election campaign at home. So we were treated to the unpleasant spectacle of all the dirty clothes baskets of war-time politics being turned out for the critical amusement of the American people. In our own country we are becoming accustomed to it, and no one pays serious attention. We realise that it is a kind of game that panders to something not very elevated in a portion of the community. It is partly because of the lack of really good novels and partly because the English Sunday is so dull that we can find time to read the knockabout turns of our political comedians. But abroad it is different, and someone ought to be sent to America to explain to that long-suffering people the true condition of affairs. They should be told that because these men, with all their faults, gave service in the war, we are grateful to them and like them to have their fun now the war is over, but that they must on no account be taken seriously, or as representative of anything British or of any considerable portion of the British people. Perhaps the Americans have discovered this already, for they are not a slow race, and lately there has been a pleasing reduction in the number of British public men stumping the New World with their travel-scarred paraphernalia.

Viewed in this light, it is all fairly amusing, but, on the other hand, the condition of the world at the moment is not so happy that one can afford to regard all life as an enormous joke. We are living through a period of change when better things are fighting desperately to come through, and the very instability of and discontent with the old order is a sure sign that if opportunities can be grasped at the full flow of the tide the world can be made an immensely better place. Disruption and discontent have so often been the forerunners of more fluid conditions that can be moulded into fairer form, and in the very fact that the kingdoms of the world are groaning together in their distress there is promise that all the pain, suffering and sacrifice of the past ten years will not have been in vain. To turn them to good account, however, we need all the energy that we possess, and so it is not good to see men of unquestioned gifts and magnetic personalities frittering their talents away in petty quarrelling, unbecoming self-advertisement and enervating attempts to justify past mistakes. The great men of history have never sought in this way to excuse themselves, and this continual harping on what has gone before leads into a cul de sac, a Nirvana of everlasting indolence and negation whose inhabitants idle away the hours with barren fancies. Our business is with the living, and there is ample enough field here for activity without raking over the past to raise the dead ghost of a thrill from its grey ashes or seeking to be stirred with stupid tales of bogeys like 'annihilation from the air' or 'red revolution.'

By all means let us be strong in aerial defence and in aerial attack. Anxious as we are for world peace, we only make its realisation more difficult by stripping ourselves naked before the enemies of peace. There is no stronger factor in world politics to-day on the side of peace than the British Empire, but that is on account of our strength as much as our aspirations. It is the spirit behind that counts, and if we are truly sincere in our desire for universal peace such sincerity of spirit has a habit of making itself felt, even though we might arm ourselves to the teeth in defence of it. So long as there are numbers of unprincipled men in the world, and distrust and jealousy among the nations, and until the last burglar has seen the error of his ways, so long the moral effect of an existing police force is necessary, not to fall upon the burglar and beat him and fling him into prison, but rather that he may be encouraged to think twice before using force on a community that has great reserves of force at its disposal. The measure of our strength is the greatness of our tolerance and moderation, and our reluctance to use it is the best proof of its existence, but to proclaim ourselves defenceless is to invite the awakening of all the powers of evil. Therefore, at the present stage, we need aeroplanes both in our own interests and in those of civilisation, whose guardians we are; but because there is no precedent for any offensive or defensive weapon becoming obsolete, and because men have not yet been supplanted by machinery, we need an army and a navy as well. For all France's increase in air strength, she has not reduced her army, and Italy's huge programme of aeroplane building is not accompanied by a diminution of her land forces.

Similarly, we must examine ourselves to see where we have failed in allowing a portion of our population to become so unhappy and so discontented that a few have lifted their eyes towards Bolshevism, and more have come to regard what are called the privileged classes antagonistically. Neither Conservatives nor Liberals can consider themselves entirely blameless, since it was under their rule that a proportion of the seeds of class hatred has taken root. We are not the sort of people to take to that kind of thing lightly, and there must have been something rotten in the organisation of our community for such a thing to have been generated in it. Instead of railing at it and antagonising it by cheap abuse or indignant denunciation, our politicians would do better to investigate the cause of its coming into being and examine themselves to see where they have failed in allowing any of those whom they represent to be so ignorant and miserable as to imagine that happiness can lie in such a direction or that anything good can be born of hate. This requires a humility of spirit that some do not seem to possess,

but without it they can never attain real greatness, and can only be the creatures of a day, the ephemeral expressions of popular whims.

Extending the hand of friendship to the Bolsheviks sounds well enough at first blush, but maturer thought must reveal the fact that it is as unintellectual and as treacherous to the cause of humanity as depriving the cause of peace of its stoutest defender by making ourselves harmless and of no weight in the councils of the nations.

Let us seek first the things of the spirit-humility, love and mercy-and, as peacemakers, be the sons of God, and then the others will be added. It is thus that the spirit of peace can be brought to the nations, nor can their aims be changed until their spirit be changed. If we are great enough to arm ourselves for humanity's sake and not become so lost in admiration for our material strength that we seek to put it to material test, then we are peacemakers. But to leave the door unguarded and the world at the mercy of force is to betray our trust and shirk the sacrifice that we may be called upon to make. Material things must be fought with material weapons, but the spirit can transmute them if they are used in a high cause, and so often the threatened catastrophe never falls if faith is unwavering. Having fallen to war, war cannot be escaped by mere denial; it must be accepted and redeemed, and redemption is only accomplished by using a base thing for a spiritual object, for thus it becomes sanctified and the curse removed.

A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, and the defeat of war will be brought about by the influences that have caused war being mobilised against it, not in a twentieth century crusade of material force, but rather in the sense of all the powers and energies of the leading nations being thrown into the scale on the side of peace, inspired by a will for peace in place of the old lust for fighting and annexation. The establishment of world peace is a spiritual matter, involving a change of heart, and it would be as absurd to believe that the League of Nations could stop war by practising militarism on a large scale as to imagine that the British Empire, at the moment, could do good by leaving open to attack all that it protects.

L. F. EASTERBROOK.

THE CASE OF THE WORKING JOURNALIST

MORALISTS have been exercised of late about the disordered state of journalism. Levity scoffs, and not unnaturally, at a calling which supplies free nostrums for everything and everybody, but somehow seems powerless to heal itself. With the exception of two or three famous London papers and a larger number in the provinces, the Press to-day is in the awkward plight of having forfeited something of its independence without any compensating gain. It is beyond the pale of this survey to indicate causes or remedies except to determine the present position of the working journalist, nor can it be denied that many of the factors of difficulty are inevitable by the very nature of the Press as an institution and a craft. Its atmosphere is so charged with contention, it depends so much for its existence on 'drive' and competition, its successes at best leave so little mark upon the memory, that even well-wishers stand bewildered, like Pilate, and find refuge in a cynical despair. Indeed, the danger is that a great portion of the public may come to ignore its real claims altogether, and regard it as a mere convenience, a spoke of the clock.

In the physical world, as fast as we discover and define Nature's elements, she reveals fresh permutations to puzzle the investigator. Similarly, you may say, modern methods no sooner banish reticence, to a degree that would have horrified a bygone generation, than popular journalism contrives some new disguise which may hypnotise and dazzle its patrons, but makes the judicious grieve. Thus anxiety and dejection are intensified in all who have the interests of the Press at heart, and the pessimist is more and more confirmed in his forebodings. When Carlyle was asked by an Edinburgh pressman for an interview, he growled: "Ye're a reporrter, I understand.' And he followed up the admission with the typical sentence: 'Then allow me to tell you, you belong to a most dis-rreputable profession.' Outbursts like these, perhaps, produce impatience, and, to judge by certain of our newspapers since, impenitence has also had its fling. Apocalyptic oracles are rather out of date, so far as the Press is concerned. It has lodged its retort against Carlyle as the apostle of silence VOL. XCV-No. 568

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in forty volumes,' but it has been merciful of late concerning the historian who exhausted emphasis in proclaiming France past redemption, and Germany the sole hope of civilisation. So, if disrepute goes by results, the Press may come from the encounter with a goodly share of the honours, leaving the Sage in the keeping of his 'eterrnal verities.'

One has still to face the reflection, however, that all cannot be well with a profession which occasions so much concern among those that practise it-concern not merely as to its operations, but as to its status and its future. Nor can the subject fail to have a special bearing on our nation. In no other country to-day, not even in the United States, is journalism more keenly on its mettle, or engaging greater capital and enterprise in certain directions of specd and efficiency. But we are haunted by an uneasy sense that in proportion to growth of faculty there is every danger of diminished power, and that with an increase in the number of those who listen there is a lessened number of those that heed. Scepticism might be no unwholesome symptom, perhaps, if it meant a developing disposition in the individual reader to judge the rights and wrongs of current problems for himself, and to look upon the newspaper as a clearing-house of fresh and accurate and all-round evidence. Alas! the signs of the time are all the other way. The public grows more and more accustomed to have everything done for it, alike in recreation, in politics, in locomotion, and so much else. If the Press has any mission at all, surely it is to rouse the public from this torpid commercialism in everyday life; and, unhappily, it is this very malady which is threatening the vitality of journalism to-day.

In other words, the Press of this country, which has rightly earned an authority unrivalled of its kind, stands in danger at present from that very form of exploitation which it used to keep in check. Moneyed men nowadays boast that they can buy newspapers like hacks at a repository, and having ridden them to a standstill, bury them by the wayside or sell them to the knacker's yard of speculation. This kind of enterprise is growing commoner, but it is no novelty. One conspicuous instance was the burking of a young London paper years ago which ought never to have perished, for it had emerged from unpromising beginnings as a competent organ equal to a long career of usefulness. But a whim of the sort that may set a paper going decreed its death, and this lethalisation of a healthy daily newspaper has been the means of preventing others from being established since.

We have seen organs reduced to the level of a tom-tom for some political or financial interest, or the mouthpiece of a reckless experiment. Famous dailies have been sold for a song over a meal, or closed down in the worst weeks of war anxiety, with serious