established and National Arbitration Courts formed. The Irish Consuls at Foreign Ports, who were, of course, to be quite independent of the resident British Consuls, were to attend to the interests and the development of Irish trade. The fact that Ireland had not a single boat for a merchant marine was a detail beneath the lofty and godlike notice of the National Council.

All these ambitious proposals came under the heading of the "Hungarian Policy." Hungary, in its famous struggle for independence, had established a boycott against Austria, which finally resulted in Hungarian freedom; but it has been pointed out that when the Hungarian delegates left the Imperial Parliament of Austria, they were the representatives of a people hardly less in numbers than the Austrians themselves, drilled and armed, and well inured to war.

Sinn Fein, therefore, began as a Passive Resistance movement, and, failing to effect anything, gradually developed into a physically militant movement. The Sinn Fein Council started by urging that Irishmen should

The New Witness.

pay no income-tax, but Sinn Feiners continued to pay it. The Sinn Fein Council urged that all British institutions should be banned, but the Sinn Feiners still inflexibly continued to draw their salaries as members of the Civil Service. Their idea was to establish native courts of law; but they themselves appeared-in at least one case as plaintiff and defendant in a case in the Sassenach Four Courts; and they generally yielded on this point of trial by what they termed a foreign judiciary. The Sinn Fein Passive Resistance movement was a movement pour rire, and the exponents of Sinn Fein were promptly condemned at the national court of ridicule an unofficial but formidable judgment bench -by their own manifest inconsistencies.

If, however, the Sinn Feiners did not live logically, they died superbly. One cannot fail to have a generous measure of sympathy for real Conscientious Objectors-whatever they object towhen they fall rifle in hand, for a principle, or suffer the last rigor of the law for a doctrine. Louis J. McQuilland.

The writer of these lines remembers a dictum of his father's, frequently repeated in times of stress and controversy, domestic or of wider import: "Well, here we are." We were reminded of this saying, which appears to us to go down to the bed-rock of truth and reality, by some remarks which we recently came across in a novel of Mr. Gilbert Cannan's. "For after all," Mr. Cannan remarks, or rather makes one of his characters remark, "what matters to us all, both individually and collectively, is daily life. History is concerned with the rather absurd and theatrical doings of

a few people, which after all have never altered the fact that we do all of us live on from day to day, and only want to be left alone." These words have a singular truth and force at the present time. The people of Europe want to go on living, not to be destroyed. To live is to pursue the activities proper to one's nature, to be unhindered and unthwarted in their exercise. To live is to create. The life of Europe is expressed in the architecture of Europe, in its pictures; the history of Europe is for the most part the record of the ever-renewed attempt, under one pretext or another, at its destruction. Life

is triumphant; it is never destroyed; indeed it is indestructible, but it is cruelly injured, hindered, limited, thwarted, retarded, from age to age. It is not too much to say that the life of Europe is something which has persisted in spite of the history of Europe. There is nothing happy or fruitful anywhere but witnesses to the triumph of life over history. History, with its wars, battles, sieges, massacres, revolutions, is the destroyer, masking its destructions under various specious and high-sounding names, glory, empire, prestige, patriotism, and the like. The greatest enthusiasts for these abstractions have generally been persons at a considerable distance from the convulsions aroused by them. The people on the spot simply wanted to escape the storm. They wanted to be let alone, as Mr. Cannan says, to be left in peace to cultivate their own little patches of vineyard. The plans of the high politicians, so far as any hint or suspicion of them got abroad among the common people, were felt as black clouds of menace rolling up and darkening their clear sky. Wars and rumors of wars have never been anything else than a black threat of anxiety and trouble to the fathers and mothers, the young men and maidens of Europe. In conscript countries, however convinced the people may be of the necessity of conscription, it is looked upon by them as a horrible hindrance to and interruption of life.

Think of Europe as Turner saw it. He was not a conscript; he was spared the ignominy and the suffering which darken and lay waste the youth of Europe at this hour. He was a free man in that better day: he could go about and see Europe, and he was gloriously able to record and perpetuate what he saw. Think of the Europe which he saw and recorded, the Europe which had not been destroyed by the dynasts, conquerors, and patriots of

so many centuries, the market-places glowing with light and color, shrill, animated, heaped up with the good things of the plentiful and fertile earth, the old carved houses, the sculptured churches, the people of each province with their own costumes, their own varied living speech. The record of the life of Europe in general is to be found in pictures. It is delightful to think that in spite of Spanish furies, French furies, furies of fire and slaughter of all sorts that a peaceful Dutch interior looked like that, that there were such merry tavern-scenes, that the Rhine-wine was that color in the tall glasses, that such happy little dogs ran about the floor. In spite of the wars there were still strolling players, and jolly kermesses and merry-makings. The old life of Europe, after all, went on largely unaffected by the wars and politics which never destroyed it, though they so cruelly interrupted it here and there -that life of which the happy leisure flowered on the painted sails of Venetian fishing-boats and sobbed and laughed in the lilt of Norman folk-songs. Turner's Europe may well seem a vision hanging in enchanted air, but we have all seen something of the old Europe of the happy little towns, of the Alpine meadows, of the contented people, the fishermen and vine-dressers, of the fêtes and pardons, the Sunday farces and guignols.

Well, the point is, that it is in spite of its history that the life of Europe has survived. If a single church is standing, if the vines are green on any hill-side slope, if life persists, if happiness and the creative faculty again and again struggle up and reappear, no thanks are due to the conquerors, the world-politicians, the imperialists of vast conceptions and designs. You come at nightfall of a summer day, say, to a little Flemish town, and put up at the Inn of the Pear-Tree. Of this tree the whole countryside is proud. As you sit at the

open window of your room the chimes of the carillon in the belfry float through the night across the square. The belfry is six hundred years old. The chimes have sounded through the wars and tumults of six hundred years. But no thanks are due to Alva, Marlborough, or Napoleon that the peartree grows green and clothes itself with blossom every spring, that the belfry is still standing, that the people of the town adapting themselves to the changes forced upon them through the years, still go their pleasant way beneath it. It is in spite of Charles the Bold and Alva, of Marlborough and of Prince Eugene, of Wellington and Blücher, that men have gone on making things and planting trees, and saving such of their treasures as they could from the whirlwind of destruction that from time to time enwrapped them.

"History is concerned," says Mr. Cannan, "with the absurd and theatrical doings of a few people." History is the affair of kings and conquerors; life is the affair of the people. The sense of real life can perhaps best be seized and tasted in the popular language of any country, the speech so concrete, so intimate, so personal, so far removed from grandiloquent abstractions and ambitions, of the happy little communities who only wanted to be let alone and to go on living. Take the homely names of the homely little trades that of a cobbler, for instance, in any language, the "savetier," the "ciabbatiere," the "soutar"-how apt and expressive the words are, how the names fit the thing like a glove, what a sense of reality and first-hand knowledge there is about them! The sky may grow black with clouds conjured up in the name of abstractions--we understand but dimly what it is all about, but this art and mystery remains the same. The legions thunder past; we are transferred from one duchy or

principality to another; and we go on clouting and mending poor men's shoes.

In the great creative artists, the genius of a people reaches its fullest and most complete expression. This is the flowering of the commonsense, of the sense of reality diffused among the whole people. The artist, the "maker" possesses and expresses the characteristics of the people from whom he springs in the highest possible degree. The face of such an artist is no doubt the typical face of his people. Who can doubt that the face of Perugino, the face of the young Raffaele was the typical face of Umbria, a personification of Umbria? The life of Umbria is in their pictures. The history of Umbria, of any medieval Italian State is but a record of treacheries, slaughters, Sinigaglia massacres, and the like, that possesses no abiding significance. Leonardo is driven from the Court of one princeling to another, his great works are destroyed, but he is the soul of the life of Italy. Cæsar Borgia filled the world with rumor and with weeping; but dust and silence lie upon him and his like. They added nothing to life.

In contrast to these destroyers, one likes to think of the companies of strolling players who through the warwasted centuries have traversed the world of history, representing and interpreting the world of life. Little accounted of by the great ones of the earth, harassed, interrupted by the world's confusions, they have gone everywhere quickening human vision and sympathy, witnessing amid the noisiest and most turbulent distractions to the things, or rather the one thing which matters and remains.

Life remains. History passes; its heaviest and most grievous passages have their period. If at the present time the interruption of life and happiness seems more cruel, the catastro

phe more universal than any that had preceded it, this also will pass. The ruin and confusion of the earth are The Nation.

transient and on the surface; her pregnant bosom is still filled with the forces of undying life.

Youth is a fault which, though it is sure to mend, age does not always find it easy to forgive. To many mature men and women it is true that the attraction of youth is irresistible. Not only do its energy and gaiety and hope fill them with delight; its very discontent, its inconsequent rebellion and ephemeral despair, warm their hearts and fill them with tender indulgence. "Like as a father pitieth his children," said the Hebrew poet, as he tried to express his conception of the attitude of God to man. The poets all love youth, and in their attitude there is some Divinity. All natural men and women feel towards children something of this tender excuse, but with adolescence the attitude of the older world becomes critical, and between youth and age there arises a barrier, disguise the fact as we may. At this moment we think the barrier is more conspicuous than usual, though very great efforts have been made to obliterate it. Across it the generations discuss life and exchange words of tenderness or reproach. For the time being the crowd on both sides are working together with one aim, but not always in perfect harmony, not often in complete accord. The older men and women, who had a right to rest, or at least to do the less arduous part of the daily task, and to do it within limits at their own time, have come back to bear the burden and heat of the day, and they are perforce yoked with the very young, those even who a short year ago were still considered too young to do much but play. All together now put their shoulders to the wheel. But if you are

young you may put your shoulder to the wheel, but you cannot put an old head on it; and the same thing is true, in an opposite sense, of the old. They still have faith in the old specifics for the cure of the world. The young have made a fresh diagnosis. They flout experience and turn a deaf ear to citations of precedent.

We talk glibly nowadays about the lengthening of youth which has taken place. We have talked of it till we believe in it. In reality youth was always as long-and as short-as it is now. Custom has changed a little, that is all. Shakespeare seems always to have regarded the dividing-line between the young and the old as being very marked. We are inclined to think that in times of great transition this line is accentuated. Great as was the move forward in Shakespeare's day, we doubt whether any such change can be traced to have occurred then as is now going on under our eyes. Even if we put aside the whole business of the war, which of itself must in a measure divide old men and young, the march of education has in the lower classes left the fathers far behind the sons. We heard the other day of an able and distinguished officer who is now fighting in France, and who fought in the Boer War. He declared the type of British private soldier to be utterly changed since then, and entirely for the better. Intellectually and morally he is a new man, and far ahead of his prototype of fifteen years ago. The officer gave the credit quite frankly where he believed it due to the schoolmasters. It is impossible that that friction

should be generated by this change. The men stand on different levels, and their outlook cannot be the same. It is like putting two social classes suddenly upon an equality. The mutual criticism is bound to be somewhat fierce. This want of sympathy is perhaps less noticeable among men who have been educated in the same manner as their fathers. Indeed, the present writer is inclined to believe that one of the few good arguments in favor of a stereotyped system of education is that it does keep the generations together. But the spirit of great times is too strong even for the Public School system, and the young men do, to a great extent, talk a new language.

Among educated women the change has been far more rapid. At the present moment there is real friction between the young and the old. The young women have taken it into their heads, not only that customs and conventions are mutable, but that human nature is mutable also. Any middleaged woman who is so fortunate as to obtain the confidence of young women will say, we believe, that many of them deeply regret what seems to them the want of faith in the old. It is impossible but that when co-operative work is undertaken the experienced workman should bear rule, and today, while the desire to serve is a hundredfold stronger than in the past, reproof is resented among young subordinates and the assumption of authority rouses discontent. At the same time, how often do we hear older women lament neglect by the young, and complain that, though not literally banished from their counsels, they are as much set aside as in America. A few women well endowed with tenderness and humor do not much mind. They smile to their contemporaries, and invite them to "look" at the vagaries going on around them, as they did fifteen years ago, when the tall

young women, asserting their independence, were children in the nursery, amusing their parents and guardians by their determination to do as they liked. Not even the harshest young person could be cruel to such women as these. Indeed, kind young people are wonderfully gentle and encouraging to their seniors, though many are apt to "dismiss" them from their intimacysetting them aside and suggesting that they should occupy themselves with their own little affairs, as those elders once set aside their children when they wished to engage in "grown-up" and unsuitable talk. There are women who take this change of manners exceedingly badly, and among them are some who seem really to have conceived a dislike to their young sisters. Among unmarried women we should say the middle-aged might be divided into spinsters who adore the young, for whom everything about them, from personal charm to want of judgment, is attractive, and those to whom all these things are an offense. They would like, if they could, to force the young into old moulds, and their fruitless effort renders them cross and breathless. There is a sense in which faith and experience must always be at variance, and experience will always. grudge to faith its dynamic power. Married women, we may add, are not wholly free of this harsh feeling of resentment against the young. Here jealousy comes in. Abdication is hard, and women as they grow older must be content to see fresh inferiors preferred before them, and to know that the siege which the new generation is laying to their citadel must be very soon successful.

Older men are often very unsympathetic with boys, but we think that they feel-in the professional class at least-less bitterness than old women often show towards girls. Nature has made an old man's lot happier than an