latter the diversity of men. The one makes democracies, the other makes monarchies. But men are all alike, and they are all unlike, and either proposition carried to its extreme defeats itself; in the former liberty becomes license, and in the latter order becomes despotism. The pendulum swings back and forth between the two extremes, and down to this day the English have succeeded in reconciling the claims of both philosophies, and of keeping the peace between them. Their gift of the solution of the problem of government to mankind rivals the great gift of Art by the Greeks, and of Law by the Romans.

But even to this day these common-sense people care nothing for the fiction, for the trappings of government. Even now Acts of Parliament begin: "Be it enacted by the King's most excellent Majesty, by and with advice and consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons in this present Parliament assembled." The King knows, and the Lords spiritual and temporal know, and the Commons know, that the King does not make the laws, or enforce the laws, but they are all equally willing to have him appear to do so. They have no taste for ostentatious participation in governing even now. They would still rather mind their own business, though there are, alas, signs nowadays that they are losing somewhat their Saxon heritage in this respect.

In the past they have taken a hand in governing only when their governors overstepped the bounds, and attempted to govern with the physical and financial aid, but without the consent of the governed. Then, over and over again, against barons or King, or whomsoever it might be, they have risen and demanded to be governed as little as need be, but accordng to their ancient custom of personal liberty for each one.

One hears occasionally in the inebriation of exuberance which vents itself in song, that: Britons never shall be slaves. It is well known, of course, that Britons have been slaves, and worn the collar of a Roman master, but the Saxons, their successors, never have been slaves. This is interesting because practically down to 1867, or forty years ago, the English government has been in a very few hands indeed.

The temptation must have been constant ever since the Romans left and the Saxons

came, for the small governing class to usurp all power. And yet with practically no voice in the government, this has never been accomplished, for it has always been prevented by the people themselves.

It should be remembered that long after the development of government into a House of Lords and a House of Commons, these two bodies were controlled by a very few men. It is said that as late as 1793, out of 513 members of Parliament, 309 of them owed their election to the nomination either of the Treasury, or of some 162 individuals who controlled the voters.

The House of Commons of 1801, including the Irish and Scotch members, consisted of 658 members, and of these 425 were returned either on the nomination, or on the recommendation of 252 patrons.

Thus has England been governed persistently by the few. Nor has this been against the wishes of the many. We have seen how, time after time, the many have demanded, and conquered for themselves, what they considered to be for their welfare and their happiness; but constant personal participation in government has not been deemed a necessity of personal freedom, but rather, indeed, a drag upon it. I am inclined to look upon this as the most important factor in their wonderful growth as a nation.

In 1832 the borough franchise was confined to householders whose houses were worth not less than £10 a year, and the county franchise was enlarged by the admission of copyholders, leaseholders, and of tenants whose holding was of the clear annual value of £50. Then and there, and for the first time in the history of the nation, England was practically governed by the middle class.

In 1867 this was followed by a still more sweeping reform, and by the Act of that year, every freeholder whose freehold was of the value of forty shillings a year; every copyholder and leaseholder, of the annual value of five pounds; and every householder whose rent was not less than twelve pounds a year, was entitled to vote for the county. Every householder in a borough, and every lodger who paid ten pounds a year for his lodging and had been resident for more than twelve months, was entitled to vote for the borough member. This is to all intents and purposes male adult suffrage.

Nevertheless, up to the election of members to this present Parliament, when an unusual number of labor members were elected, Parliament has been composed of an overwhelming majority chosen from the leisure classes.

Pitt once said that an Englishman with an income of ten thousand pounds a year had a right to be a peer. The English voter still, to a large extent, takes the same view. He seems to hold that those have the best claim to go to Parliament who have the leisure and wealth to enable them to go conveniently. Even now when a danger ously large number of people,-some say thirty millions-are always on the verge of starvation, the voter is but little touched by that despair of the individual in his own manhood, reduced to a system known as Socialism. He still believes in his gentry as most to be trusted, and best qualified to govern. He has a rooted distrust of those who wish to be paid to govern. He has not ceased to look upon the business of governing as a duty, not a trade.

Some instinct tells him, for no one would accuse the British voter of being either a philosopher, or of being unusually intelligent even, that the solution of the problem of his lack of wealth does not lie in the fact that his gentry have too much. To take another man's coat does not take with it the ability to keep that coat against all comers, any more than to exchange gloves with the man who has just knocked you out in a sparring bout would enable you in turn to knock him out. That easy solution of inequality, that because somebody else has more, therefore it is that I have less, has not fooled the Englishman as yet. He has only to look across the channel to see the results of that philosophy. When he looks he sees a nation that has so belittled its men that they can only prevent being swallowed up by their enemies by lending their hard-earned gold to Russia, an autocracy with which, of course, an honest republic could have nothing in common, and by accepting the friendship of England, a monarchy, because England wishes a buffer-state between herself and Germany.

In a hundred years England has grown great, while since the Revolution France has diminished to the stature of an epicene amongst nations, trafficking in her ideals and in her honor, and advertising the virtue

of her capital for sale to all comers as her principal stock in trade. She is like a pretty woman who will sell anything for security and comfort. This lesson has not been lost upon the Englishman, dull as he is.

Fox, Liverpool, and Lord John Russell, all entered Parliament before they were of age, though this was technically a breach of the law, which required that a member should be of age, a male, and of some wealth. So closely indeed have these people clung to their tradition about the land, that many, no doubt, will be surprised to learn that it was only at the beginning of the reign of the late Queen Victoria that one could become a member of Parliament without being the possessor of a certain amount of landed property. He must be a landlord, in short.

He might have thousands invested in securities of all kinds, that mattered not; he must be a landholder. They came to England to be free landholders, and when Queen Victoria came to the throne that was still their ideal of what a man fit to assist in governing should be.

As late as the middle of the eighteenth century England was almost entirely rural. The greater number of the towns were merely country towns. Perhaps the secret of the independence, and the homogeneity of the population is to be found in this multitude of men who firmly believed in the land, were permanently settled upon the land, and whose claim to personal dignity and political and social distinction rested upon the possession of the land.

We have heard in our own day, in America, often repeated, the cry: Back to the land! Nowhere will one find stronger arguments to support such advice than in the history of the Saxons in England. One might choose as the three requisites of a people that should prosper and conquer, that they should believe in God, live on the land, and let their leaders govern.

It is only in comparatively recent times that England has ceased to be a nation of farmers. In the middle of the fourteenth century the population of England and Wales was probably about 2,300,000; at the end of the seventeenth century something over 5,000,000; and in 1831, 14,o00,000.

The expansion of England into an Em

pire grows as naturally and as surely out of this love of theirs for the land and liberty, as the first settlement of England by the Saxons grew out of this same desire.

Their Saxon plain was crowded. The Jutes led by descendants of the warlike and roving Odin, needed companions in arms, and these Saxons followed them on one of their excursions to England.

Finding that the Saxons settled peaceably and industriously on the land, and acted as a buffer-state between their own settlement and the roving Britons, they induced still more Saxons to come over, and more came, and then more and more, until they became the predominant factor in the settlement of the country.

They were not, as is generally supposed, and as is often erroneously stated, of the fighting, marauding, restless breed of the piratical races, which from time to time ravaged the coasts of both what is now England and what is now France.

In spite of their many wars, the English, as were their peasant ancestors the Saxons, are not a warlike people. Si res poscat, writes Tacitus. If it is worth while they fight. But they fought not as did the fiercer tribes, merely for the love of fighting. Read their history and you find and it greatly alters certain preconceived opinions that they were not, and are not, a war-loving, or a quarrelsome race.

It is often said that England is always fighting somewhere. When one considers the enormous area of land, and the varied populations she controls, it is not surprising that she should have constant trouble on her hands. On the other hand, if one investigates these wars, big and little, they all fall under one general head: the protection of her subjects in the possession of the land.

The two wars with China were to protect her landowners in India who trafficked in opium with the Chinese. The war in the Crimea was against Russia, looming up as her rival in India. The support of the Allies against Napoleon was a necessary commercial expedient to save her shipping and her commerce. The war with America was again, at first, a question of commercial significance alone. The war in Africa was plainly enough for the upholding of the status of her citizens against the Dutch. There is a superb selfishness in

volved in each and every one of these conflicts. No one can defend for a moment, the terrible hypocrisy of the race, in their insistence upon the right of their traders to debauch the Chinese, by the sale of opium against the wishes of the Chinese authorities. Imagine the horror of the Englishman should a neighbor nation insist upon the right to sell cocaine in England whether he liked it or not, and give as a reason that a certain colony derived a large revenue from the sale of cocaine, which would be cut off if England refused to allow its sale in her territories. This is exactly what happened in China. The British colony of Hong Kong is a monument to England's infamous selfishness where her trade is concerned. Hong Kong was taken from the Chinese as an indemnity for daring to make war upon England's opium trade.

The war with America was due to selfishness, coupled with forgetfulness. The Englishman went to America, almost exactly as the Saxon went to England. He went for land and liberty. The settlers were agriculturists, who founded free estates and drove off the warring, nomadic tribes, just as the Saxons drove off the Britons. These American settlers were of the same class as those they left behind them. Let us get it out of our heads and keep it out, that England is an aristocracy. It is not and never has been. It has not and never has had a Noblesse. At once, indeed, almost before they set foot on land, the wiser and wealthier among them, are set up in authority over them, not to rule them, but to govern for them. Here we have the same institutions again, and the same dogged insistence upon liberty to till the soil in peace. But when England, forgetting her own history, and her own blood, set out to rule and to tax without representation these people, she was precipitating exactly the same kinds of conflict as had taken place between John and the Barons; between Simon de Montfort and the Barons; and between Charles and the Parliament. The result was foredoomed. The Saxons can only live in one way, and that is by ruling themselves. As the greatest representative of the Saxon race of the last two hundred years put it: A government of the people, for the people, by the people. Their confidence in this form of government has resulted in forcing its adoption upon all peo

ples, and all countries, that they control. That any family, clan, tribe, or nation, should wish to live under other than this Saxon arrangement, is to them unthinkable.

Lord Curzon, late viceroy of India, in a volume entitled, "Problems of the Far East," writes as follows in his dedication: "To those who believe that the British Empire is, under Providence, the greatest instrument for good that the world has ever seen and who hold with the writer, that its work in the Far East is not yet accomplished, this book is dedicated." Where, in the history of mankind, may one look to find such a magnificent assumption of virtue and omniscience, coupled with incomprehensible self-satisfaction? It makes one fearful for the destinies of the race when one sees it proclaim itself thus arrogant. Here is a haughty egotism that would make Alexander, Cæsar, or Napoleon turn pale. Who believes that the world is better where England dominates? The English. Who believes that India is happier? The English. Who believes that Ireland is happier? The English. Who believes that the East under English protection is happier? The English. Who believes that North America is happier? The English. But what do the four hundred millions of people, controlled by these million English gentlemen, whose omniscient prophet Lord Curzon is, what do they think? What do they say? Personally I am not questioning or criticising. I am merely a child making notes. This amazing assumption that England and God-mark that in Lord Curzon's dedication the British Empire takes precedence of Providence-have between them done more for the world than any other agency, is a characteristic of these people that cannot be too often insisted upon. As I have said before, it is not a pose with them. It is not impudence, it is their rooted belief in their own superiority. Anybody who starts out to have dealings with them, either personally or along international lines, must take that

into consideration. They know only one way. That is their way, and their way is the best way and is sanctioned by God who, by the way, is the God of the English national church.

It is magnificent, is it not? but it makes one stop just for a moment to get one's breath.

Let some one tell us what fantastic arrangement of molecules turned the youthful rake into a St. Augustine, the unknown country lad into a Shakespeare, the Corsican peasant into a Napoleon, or the West ern rail-splitter and country lawyer into a Lincoln, and when these are all explained, there will remain an even greater mystery: how these Saxon peasants became the English Empire of to-day.

It is said often enough that a man who restricts his energies to the pursuit of one end, who thinks of nothing else, saves himself for that alone, keeps his eyes fixed on that alone, is likely to succeed even though he be of mediocre powers. The fable of the hare and the tortoise was written as a brief commentary on this fact, that it's doggedness that does it! These Saxons, since the historian's first introduction to them, inhabiting that Saxon plain, have had apparently but one aim: possession of the land in peace. Little by little they have become the inheritors of one-fifth of all the land there is. We have traced here, by a mere thread of narrative, their history, and we have noted their present status among the nations of the world. We have seen nothing brilliant or heroic, nothing Napoleonic in this story; but merely steady growth along ever the same lines, aided by a genius for compromise. They stop and wait when they must, they fight when they must, they even pay to be let alone when they must, they spill over into other countries when they must, but land and liberty they keep ever before them as their goal. Who are the English, what are the English? They are Saxons, who love the land, who love their liberty, and whose sole claim to genius is their common-sense.