and thrown down within the boundaries of London. Here, indeed, there is nothing that you may not see. You may find a street where not a single shop bears an English name; you may arrive at a station where blackvisaged, red-turbaned porters seize your luggage without warning or apology; you may mount a single staircase in a dingy house and find live lions for sale; or you may happen on a cheap circus and be stoned for daring to enter it in a black coat. Paris, too, has her distant quarters, such as La Villette and St. Ouen, which a stranger enters with a guide, and is happy to leave with a whole skin. But these quarters are appointed for a special purpose, and not even the risk run by the wayfarer is a just cause of surprise. Indeed, the real, circumscribed Paris hides her squalor by distributing it, whereas London sets up a ring-fence here and there and drives her poor within it. In London the starving man may be a near neighbour of the wealthiest banker; but the banker knows naught of the poverty that grinds at the bottom of his back-garden, and he knows naught because he does not look very far between his front-door and his brougham. Yet should curiosity seize him, he might find many a small island of starvation divided by a narrow strait from the mainland of mansions. Paris, on the other hand, does not mass her paupers, she sends them aloft. Prosperity decreases as it mounts the stairs, and under the same roof may live (at different altitudes) a judge of the Appeal Court and a poor seamstress. In other words London makes a horizontal, Paris a vertical division of rich and poor; and since not even the most curious investigator can wantonly climb five storeys, the joyous face of Paris seldom reveals the signs of desolation and misery.

Thus it is that London amazes the returned traveller by its silent, monumental immensity,-amazes and depresses him at the same time. But there is one beauty of London which Paris does not share. London, save when the wind is in the East, has an atmosphere which sanctifies ugliness. Paris is cut out with a hard precision that makes you sigh for the warm, comfortable fog. The colour and aspect of London change a dozen times a day; the colour and aspect of Paris shift only as day turns to night.

But life does not live on picturesqueness alone: the eye is not sole tyrant of the mind; and when you have weighed London against Paris in the balance of your approval, when you have determined that, while London should best suit the romantic temperament, Paris ought to attract the sympathy of the true classic, one question is still unanswered : where may a man of lofty aspirations and modest income more easily enjoy himself? An answer is difficult, because the preference must depend upon character, prejudice, and temperament. But in the first place an Englishman, before he attempts to resolve his doubt, must put aside the false impression stubbornly created by the newspapers. Of course, if Paris be a common beargarden, where Jew fights Gentile, and Gentile has no other ambition than the torture of innocent men, it is plainly loathsome and uninhabitable. But Paris is not the city of wild hysteria which her journals represent. Apart from her Press, she is quiet to indifference. A complete absence of censorship has encouraged a set of wild beasts to scurrility, and scurrility is profitable in Paris, as it is profitable wherever it be unlicensed. But Paris lives and smiles in contemptuous toleration of epigrammatic

of

falsehood; and she may be most resolutely bent upon amusing herself, at the very moment when the rest of Europe suspects a revolution. Of course a revolution is never impossible, because a body of Frenchmen may always lose control of its nerves. Yet disturbance is an episode to a life of pleasure, and it does not interrupt our argument to acknowledge that Paris has not the talent politics. For politics do but touch the fringe of life, and many a bad government has made for gaiety. Which is it then, Paris or London, for a sanely conducted life? As I have said, it depends upon temperament. The one is the home of pleasure, the other of comfort. Paris wears the open smile of joyousness upon her face. London is like a Moorish palace, whose dark, austere outside is a deceptive cloak to the luxury within. The Parisian loves his café: the Londoner haunts his club; and while the one sits at a public corner, which for him is the navel of the world, the other rigidly excludes the people, and takes a certain delight in boring himself where no stranger may witness the comfortable process. Thus you may typify the contrast between London and Paris; here the club, there the café, which with their different advantages correspond to the difference in the national temperament.

But those who can appreciate a life in the open air will give their suffrages to the boulevards. Many years since Mme. Metternich with perfect justice described Paris as the cabaret of Europe, and when so intelligent a people as the Parisians sets itself to the keeping of taverns, its success is triumphant. Nowhere else in the world may you live with the cheap elegance which is universal in Paris. There, indeed, is the art of living understood with absolute cunning.

"The French alone," said Chateaubriand, who was as little blind to his country's qualities as to his country's defects, "the French alone know how to dine with method, as they alone know how to compose a book." It is no doubt a part of their perfect logic. Dinner is an inevitable pleasure; therefore, simple or extravagant, it shall be perfect. Thus in Paris you may vary your experience a hundred times and never be disappointed. If fortune be kind to you and money jingles in your pocket, you may sit in a little window on the Quai des Grands Augustins, and eat such a dinner as London could never design. Or you may admire the white walls and the peerless cook of the Café Anglais, whose decadence you need not deplore with the journals so long as the dinner is cooked to a point and the delicate wine soothes your palate. And if fortune frown, are there not a dozen modest taverns hidden in dark streets or darker passages, where you may find (for nothing) such a dinner as few aldermen are permitted to consume? Only on the one hand you must avoid the vast hotels, whose plate-glass dining-rooms are expected to pay a proper percentage, and on the other hand those respectable eating-houses which give you your bill at the door, and which expect you to feed without amenity and with an unhappy despatch.

In the scheme of life, food and drink take up a large and merited space, and this space London denies to our delight. True it is that in the seclusion of a club you may dine with tranquil luxury, but there are times at which the fancy roams and when a row of familiar, contented faces appals the stoutest heart. But where shall we go to beguile our leisure? Where can we find a modest dinner and a bottle of sound wine? Certain restaurants there are where, if you have

a full purse and are dressed for the evening, you may survey the rich man at his dinner. Yet it is not entertaining; surprise is rare either in food or company, and after a very narrow experience both taste and economy suggest a simple steak and an evening paper quietly digested in a solemn corner of Pall Mall.

And when you have drunk your coffee, which is not always palatable in London, where shall you go to amuse yourself ? To a music-hall, and be horrified by a raffish vulgarity? To a theatre where you shall hear an actor, who has not learned to speak, mouth the lines of a dramatist, who has not learned to write? No, not even if you can afford half-a-guinea for a seat! In Paris, on the other hand, an evening need never be dull. If the cafés tire you with their ceaseless movement, their infinite variety of type and character, then there are a dozen tiny theatres which invite you to entertainment and applause. You may go to the Tréteau de Tabarin, and delight in the topical songs of M. Fursy. If it be the summer, you may dine in the open air of the Ambassadeurs, and listen to Yvette or her successor. Or you may drive into the Bois, and listen as you drink your coffee in an enchanted pavilion to the wild strains of gipsy music. Or you may go to the Théâtre Français and marvel at the beautiful simplicity of a traditional art. Or you may see Sarah Bernhardt in her repertory, and even with luck you may witness this generation's supreme triumph of dramatic art, Coquelin as Tartuffe. All these joys are possible to you for a modest sum, and if they please not your idle taste, then there is the café, and still the café, and the café till one in the morning.

In London, then, life is solemn and demure. The unwonted comfort, the unusual calm persuades us to the dis

cussion of literature or philosophy. It compels us to exchange dominoes for whist, a chance acquaintance for a solid friendship. A library soon takes the place of the café, and the homecomer is seduced by the sterner pleasures of virtue from the habit of trivial idleness. Which is better? Again I say it is a matter of temperament. Which is cheaper? Paris assuredly. For on the banks of the Seine, if no business disturb your leisure, you may buy twice as much for your money as on the banks of the Thames. There, indeed, you need not count your income for an inexorable tax; you need not starve yourself to pay such a rent as will claim you the respect of your fellows. For you

may live, in Paris, where you will and at what altitude suits your convenience. And if you be really poor the payment of a single glass will give you shelter, and newspapers, and amusement for a whole afternoon. Then if the chase amuse you, you may wander up and down the Quais, hunting the rare books which now and then escape notice at the bottom of the box. Your bag is likely to be small: you may tramp many an unrewarded mile; but while there are trees overhead, the river is at your feet, and the collector will find it more amusing to turn over the cheap novels which may conceal a treasure, than to study the cold type of a bookseller's catalogue. In brief, if there were no such thing as nationality, no such virtue as patriotism, I should say, by all means take care to be born in London and, once grown to man's estate, to spend your life in Paris.

But happily there is a virtue called patriotism, there is a sentiment which endears to your heart an ugly prospect and a bad dinner. A tough steak may evoke a pleasant memory, and even were it not for the splendid character of London there would

How

be a reason for living out your days in your native land. To be abroad in a time of stress is for a man of spirit an intolerable affliction. can we listen with equanimity to the partial (or impartial) discussion of a situation which involves our country's honour? The man who wakes up in his own land has at least a sense of home; the trees, the birds, the roads of the country, the cabs, the clubs, the parks of town are all familiar to him. Beyond that, he knows, if he have any faith in the government of the hour, that he can endorse the collective opinion of his fellow-men. So he may go through life with his nerves calm, and with no single bristle of antagonism on end. Moreover, he may enjoy the pleasure of a simple, unconstrained friendship, in which

silence is as highly privileged as speech, and in which a sign is as clearly intelligible as words. Nor can these advantages ever be counterbalanced by material luxury. In a strange city an Englishman may make many pleasant acquaintances; he will rarely make a single sincere friend. None the less the years spent abroad will be profitable beyond their momentary enjoyment; for absence reveals the less obvious virtues of our own land, and provides a standard of measurement, which the home-keeping man will ever lack. Moreover, London for two reasons is superior to Paris as it is superior to all cities in the world. It is inhabited by Englishmen, and through it flows the incomparable Thames.

CHARLES WHIBLEY.

22

AT the present crisis there should be no apology needed for trying to ascertain the precise signification of the term Suzerainty. Perhaps precise is rather a rash word, if we may judge by the remarkably diverse opinions held by statesmen and lawyers as to the attributes which distinguish a suzerain Power. A few extracts from the debates which took place in Parliament, when the terms of the Convention made between this country and the South African Republic in 1881 were discussed, will be sufficient to convince the reader how little finality there is about the bare expression. Lord Selborne, then Lord Chancellor, gave it as his opinion that Suzerainty meant that the suzerain was lord-paramount of the people who were subject to his vassalage: that the control of the foreign and frontier relations essentially distinguished a paramount Power; and that no war could be made upon adjoining native tribes, and no treaty concluded with foreign Powers, except by the authority of the suzerain. From this it may be inferred that the Chancellor considered that a vassal State had full control over its internal affairs, an inference supported by Lord Kimberley's intimation that the word imparted the assignment to the vassal of "independent power as regards its internal government." On the other hand, Lord Cairns, a past Lord Chancellor and a lawyer of at least equal eminence, after quoting Sir Evelyn Wood's statement, that the country was to have entire self-government as regards its own interior affairs, but that it could not take action against or with an

outside Power without permission of the suzerain, expressed his belief that the reservation of foreign relations did not sufficiently define the meaning of the word, for if it were so, the sovereign of Great Britain would be suzerain of Afghanistan in consequence of the arrangement with the Amir; while Lord Salisbury suggested that the existence of Suzerainty did not preclude interference with the internal affairs of the vassal.

Where the divergence of opinion. among the doctors is so wide, the ordinary man must tread with care, more especially when he finds that the text-books on International Law treat this question somewhat lightly. The conclusion one is forced to is that, although the fundamental conditions of Suzerainty are definite enough, there are a number of incidents which vary materially in each individual instance; and this conclusion is substantiated by a writer whose special province is outside the Law of Nations. The truth of the matter possibly is that the term was introduced into International Law from the feudal system, in which it originated, as a convenient method of describing a connection existing between two States, one of which had certain rights of control over the other, without a very definite conception of the limitation which should be placed on its use.

In Calvo's DICTIONNAIRE DE DROIT INTERNATIONAL we find that the term Suzerainty was employed in the Middle Ages to describe the position of an over-lord who owed justice and protection to his vassals, while they, in