6

6

6

allowing every man his own religion, saturated with the 'philosophy of uniqueness; they hold God to be complex and of an endless variety of aspects, to be expressed by no ' universal formula nor approved in any uniform manner;' 'a transcendental and mystical God' different in the 'measure of every man's individuality.' In private a 'Samurai' may feed his secret religious life' with music and books of devotion, in public he is said to worship only by joint work and effort. Here we are reminded of More's union of the life contemplative' and 'the life active,' but the older Utopia retained the use of churches and public worship: it had priests, (though of exceeding holiness and 'therefore very few '), and services where men might in dim and doubtful light gather together their cogitations, and where, though their creeds were sundry and manifold, they might agree together in the honour of the divine nature, as 'going divers ways to one end.' Instead of the dim church the 'Samurai' have a new and finely imagined provision for meditation: once in every year for seven days at a time each of them must go alone to the high and lonely places of the 'world;' quiet resolute exiles, they climb or sail or march in the wilderness, and commune with the emptiness and the elemental forces. So there remains always in the bearing ' and the faces of this Utopian chivalry, a faint persistent tinge of detachment from the immediate heats and hurries, 'the little graces and delights, the tensions and stimulations of the daily world.' 'It pleased me strangely,' says Mr. Wells, and it pleases us too, to think of this steadfast ' yearly pilgrimage of solitude, and how near men might 'come then to the high distances of God.'

When we have reached a full understanding of the 'Samurai' we have in reality come to an end of the modern Utopia: we have without a formal answer solved our remaining question, as to the constitution, machinery and customs of the ideal State. These will be just what the 'Samurai' choose to make them, and Mr. Wells has no more power than we have to dictate to his own mightier and wiser offspring. He may foretell, if he can, and we may believe, if we choose; but any attempt to dogmatise would only lead to abstract argument, and for that we have Plato already. Mr. Wells is quite aware of this; he knows that where the old Utopists built like children with a box of wooden bricks, he has been experimenting like an electrician, with eternal and immeasurable forces. The chapters, therefore, in which the Utopian life and institutions are touched upon are tentative,

suggestive and hypothetical rather than historical in form. Still they are well worth reading, and comparing with the older ideals, of which they supersede part, and part they repeat or recreate. Mr. Wells's World State owns all the land, the great local governments holding under it. It also owns all the sources of energy, developes and distributes water power, wind power, coal and electric power: maintains health, order, roads, cheap and rapid locomotion; conveys and distributes goods and labour; pays for and secures healthy births, subsidises literature and research. But where almost all Utopian States have led the way it will not follow it stops short of absolute Communism. The individual has his freedoms and properties; he is not to be the slave of a bureaucracy, for it is for him that the State itself exists. But neither may he enslave his fellow-man: all servile and degrading labour is abolished; machinery and mechanical ingenuities make life equally easy for every one. The minimum wage is sufficient for a livelihood; education is free from beginning to end. Marriage regulations are lax as between the partners themselves, strict in so far as they affect the children to be born. But they are not based upon a superstitious terror of heredity, and where there is no disability they introduce the sound principle of rewarding maternity as a profession and a public service. It is strange that no one has worked out this idea since Bacon hinted at it in New Atlantis,' where they say the King is debtor 'to no man, but for the propagation of his subjects.' The Unfit are dealt with sternly by Mr. Wells's Utopians; and drunkards, thieves, cheats, violent criminals, and persons with transmissible diseases are cut off by a kind of social 'surgery' and segregated in islands of their own. We pause here for a moment and recall the milder folk of Nowhere. How could they look happy if they knew that 'their neighbours were shut up in prison, while they bore 'such things quietly?' How, indeed, would any AngloSaxon community submit to the transportation of their relatives, say for a seventh offence against sobriety? The question widens as we think of it: how far would they bow in general to the rule of these all-knowing, all-ordering, ever-present, hard, keen, remote, ascetic Samurai;' these Platonic Guardians in the white robe of the Knights Templars and the steel-and-leather caps of Cromwell's Ironsides? Would they not hate them as ill-conditioned lower boys hate the sixth-form monitors of an English Public School? Oderint dum metuant,' says Mr. Wells;

the Base and Dull may hate them as they hate their own conscience, but the heterogeneous inefficient cannot rise against the efficient class. They can, however, rise into it; there is no gulf between rulers and ruled; Utopia is, in fact, what England is in theory, a democracy governing itself through an open aristocracy.

The Samurai,' then, are Mr. Wells's contribution to our Utopian knowledge, our our Inductive Future. Like his spiritual ancestors, Englishmen and Utopists before him, he has dreamed the dream of his generation. But he has done something more: he has preached a new crusade to a new chivalry. His book is not so much a traveller's tale as a call to action and a plan for the march; it can hardly be laid aside without an answer, yes or no. Shall we stand arguing irrelevant matters; debating the source of an undoubted impulse, questioning the power of legislation to make men virtuous, or of environment to change their inherited nature? On these points Mr. Wells may have overshot the mark; but the vital part of his proposal is that we should band ourselves deliberately to make the majority of men what only the small minority can be now. Then the right and reasonable thoughts which now fall dead among the stones will find fertile ground in almost every direction: so by changing not the quality but the quantity of the best opinion we shall obtain a real advance in the practice of life, as the wisest have long understood and desired it. A world-wide standard of efficiency, an army of the trained and disciplined, a brotherhood of devotion to the service of man, conceived as the offspring of an eternal purpose is not our civilisation near a final decadence, if it is not to advance along some such line as this? And has not Mr. Wells made clearer the line of this advance, given its pioneers a memorable name, and summoned all men, without distinction, to join the new Order? Is it not time that we who are of the "Samurai" should know ourselves ' and each other'?

ART. IV.-MADAME DE STAËL AND NAPOLEON.

1. Dix Années d'Exil. Par Madame DE STAËL. Avec une introduction, des notes et un appendice par PAUL Gautier. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1904.

2. Madame de Staël et Napoléon. Par PAUL GAUTIER. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1903.

3. Napoleonic Statesmanship in Germany. By HERBERT A. L. FISHER, M.A. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903.

4. Napoleonic Studies. By J. H. ROSE. London: George Bell & Sons, 1904.

5. Napoléon et l'Angleterre. Par P. COQUELLE. Paris: PlonNourrit, 1904.

6. L'Europe et la Révolution Française. Par ALBERT SOREL. Vol. VIII. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1904.

7. Paris sous Napoléon. (Consulat provisoire et Consulat à temps.) Par L. DE LANZAC DE LABORIE. Paris: PlonNourrit, 1905.

HOWEVER well acquainted men may be with the facts of history, they are not often intimate with its emotions. The interest in occurrences is not paralleled in strength or popularity by a corresponding interest in enthusiasms, and though some try in dealing with history to feel, as well as to think and see, that sympathy is always rare which can be fired by ideals long discarded and by faiths long dead. The French Revolution is for many minds but a catalogue of unsuccessful experiments in reform, and in the present day of disillusion it is difficult to realise with any adequate intensity the grandeur and sanctity of the ideals that lay behind that strange series of events. Now that hearts no longer beat with enthusiastic hope in the future of democracy; now that minds no longer expect the millennium in the enfranchisement of man, it is hard even to imagine the attitude of those revolutionary leaders who thought by their doctrines to bring about the kingdom of heaven upon earth. In France in the year 1789 men seemed as it were intoxicated with the thought of their own perfectibility, and blinded by the vision of their own apotheosis. It was as though an ecstasy had come upon the soul of the French nation, as though a voice had spoken from the clouds, bidding men to rise and make the great ascent towards perfection.

The Revolution began in no selfish scramble for possessions,

for its pioneers had their gaze riveted on nobler and less corruptible gains. The movement was in its inception spiritual; men were at first desirous, not of material rights, but of ideal rights; and it must be remembered that the axe was not, at the beginning, laid to the root of the ancient tree of Feudalism, under whose dim shadows the people had existed for so long. The nation that had sat in darkness had seen a great light, and though centuries of despotic years had made men unfit for democracy, yet they were eager with the eagerness of inspiration to rise and live according to the words that rang so grandly in the air, Freedom, Equality, Fraternity. The later rage for destruction and blood was born of disappointment, and the accounts left to us of the singular feasts of federation bear witness to the spirit in which the great resurrection was attempted. The first revolutionaries acted on the hypothesis that man was born good, and that it was only necessary to break down the conventional social barriers to let that goodness everywhere prevail. The pathetic love-feasts and dances of the 'fédérés,' in which Wordsworth took part as he journeyed down the Rhône, seemed almost to justify such an assumption. But when the moment of ecstasy was past, and the idealists found that their principles were not accepted by everyone, and that their hopes were by many considered vain, like the Inquisitors of Spain, they did not lose faith in their own tenets, but thought those who did not agree with them in mortal sin and worthy of death. Their hearts hardened, and they began to violate the liberty they preached. The oppression and cruelty of the second Revolution, which destroyed the Monarchy, but did not establish the Republic, remains a dire and discouraging monument to the betrayal of ideals in precipitate action.

After ten years a sudden end was put to all the theories and visions in which the Revolution had had its origin, no less than to the inefficient administration of the Directorate, by the man of marble-Bonaparte. Already, while commanding in Italy, the Corsican general had shown the home government that he was possessed of an independent and arbitrary temper; he pursued his own policy, and would submit to no dictation from his official superiors. During the first Italian campaign he became acutely conscious of his great personality; and he said of himself that every day he seemed to see before him new possibilities and new horizons. His imperious character made itself even more apparent in Egypt. There, in his contact with