that this is my last year of life. Let me tell you that it is not, so please rest easy on that score. As for a present, I want nothing on earth but a new digestion, and I don't suppose your children can give me that; quite the reverse. Let them save their money in their money boxes.

Yours truly,

Joseph Lammiman.

Mrs. Winter to Mr. Lammiman.

December 13.

My dear Uncle,-You have entirely misunderstood my letter. I did not say "once again" with the meaning that you think, but merely as a way of showing my appreciation of yet another visit from you. I hope you will continue to spend Christmas with us for twenty years at least.

On thinking over your letter I have decided that perhaps it will be best for the children to give you each some little article that will be useful through the year to come.

Anticipating your visit with the keenest pleasure, believe me,

Your affectionate niece,

Annie Winter.

Mr. Lammiman to Mrs. Winter.

December 14.

Dear Annie,-Your letter of the 13th to hand. Why you should want me to die at the age of seventy-eight I cannot imagine; but by wishing to terminate my visits to you in twenty years' time, you force me to the belief that that is what you desire. Where am I to go for my Christmas in 1926? My father (your great uncle) lived to be ninety-three, and his mother was ninety-six before him. Your great aunt Wilkins is eighty-five next week, and, as you know, I am said to resemble her in constitution very closely. As for the presents, I desire to accept

brush, but he has since bought one. He also bought some socks. A silk handkerchief for his neck would be a nice thing, but he has several. I am Yours faithfully, Emma Bulstrode.

Mr. Lammiman to Mrs. Winter.

December 27. Dear Annie,-Thank you for your hospitality. Now that I have had another opportunity of seeing your children, my great-nephews and nieces, I think you ought to know what changes I observe to have taken place in them during the year. Arthur I found inattentive to the comforts of others, and very arrogant. Cecil has a bad habit of giggling which ought to be checked. Little Ernest may develop well, but he requires a strong hand. Margaret seemed to me unfortunately wilful, and I heard her whimpering a good deal in the early morning; while Bertha has acquired an assurance which cannot be too much deplored in one so young. As a whole they seemed to me to lack Punch.

thoughtfulness.

For example, it frequently happened that on entering the room I found them occupying the most comfortable chairs, and there was no alacrity in springing up to offer them to me, and although it was Christmas, the season of generosity and goodwill, they had neither made nor purchased any little gift for me, to whom they owe so much (to say nothing of the turkey), and who always has had their welfare at heart, as, indeed, this long and irksome letter testifies.

I know that you are not in a position to have the best tuition for them, and that you sadly miss poor George, but at the same time I must not neglect my duty of saying that for some of these shortcomings I hold you to blame. You, at any rate, being their mother, might have suggested that some little present to their uncle would have been fitting.

I am, my dear Annie, with best wishes for the New Year,

Yours truly,

Joseph Lammiman.

We are extremely glad that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has taken office. We argued from the first, as our readers are aware, dissenting from the general body of Liberal newspapers, that this course was at once probable and advisable. We are well aware that the Unionist Party or some of its members are congratulating their leader on another brilliant manoeuvre. Mr. Balfour is welcome to as many congratulations on that score as he cares to have. If anyone had to write the epitaph of his Government he would trace a good many of its misfortunes to the brilliant manoeuvres for which Mr. Balfour is famous. The

country is sick of them and the party has nearly died of them. If it recovers it will owe its recovery to very different treatment. But whether Mr. Balfour has added another to his fine record of manoeuvres or not, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has, we are convinced, done absolutely the right thing in lending himself, as some would say, to that manoeuvre, or, as we should prefer to say, in taking advantage of it. The plain man does not appreciate the finesse of Parliamentary tactics or the dodging for position. All he sees is that Mr. Balfour has confessed that he cannot nurse and sustain the last flicker of life in his Government for

three brief weeks, and that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is prepared to form a Government before dissolving in spite of the inconveniences which are unquestioned and the risks which are suspected, in order to let the country pronounce between parties at the earliest opportunity and to save as much as is possible of the next Session of Parliament. Mr. Balfour's humiliation is not concealed, and, on the other hand, the readiness of the Liberal Leader to put up with certain inconveniences in the public interest is plain to everybody. "If public men have no virtues," said Junius, "let us use their vices." If Mr. Balfour's care for constitutional practice would not allow the country an election when it wanted one, the Liberal Leader did right in using his passion for brilliant manœuvres as a means of obtaining one. For our part, the discussion about the relative advantages of the situation leaves us sceptical of the good judgment of Mr. Balfour's decision. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is not likely to suffer from the public comparison of his Ministry with the ambitious mediocrities who were Mr. Balfour's pliant colleagues. Mr. Austen Chamberlain will not look a greater man for being put side by side with Mr. Asquith nor will Mr. Lyttelton become a sage because Mr. Morley steps into office. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has done the straightforward and spirited thing in accepting office. His action is characteristic, and we certainly think it is wise.

The parts, indeed, which the two Prime Ministers have occupied in these transactions are singularly characteristic of their careers. Mr. Balfour likes to do a thing by some oblique method. We are sure it must be his natural instinct to leave his house by the pantry window in order to be able to maintain a magnificent equivocation if he should happen to be asked whether he had

been out of doors. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, cautious and shrewd as his Scotch nature is, is above all things a straightforward and direct politician. It is not by art or stratagem but by the sheer power of the integrity and bravery of his character that he has won the honor which is his to-day. He has not been made Prime Minister by relations, by Society, by his skill in studying and gratifying the tastes of the hour, or by his vigilant care to follow the party he professed to lead. He has never pursued his own self-advancement. There is nobody who would deny that he is a scrupulous and singularly disinterested man. In all the disagreeable circumstances through which he has led his party, there has been nothing which did so much to sustain his position in the party as the universal knowledge that he would scorn to scramble for place, and that whatever he did was done from public and not from private motives. If a man has little ambition in politics he is in some danger of treating politics with levity, and he is apt to become a clever trifler rather than a serious politician. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is a man in whom ambition is an inconspicuous quality. The leadership of the party came to him unsought. It was known that he was content enough with a less eminent and a less arduous position. But if he owes little to the stimulus of ambition, he has never fallen into the error of treating politics as if they were meant to be merely the amusement of rich and idle men. He has kept before him a high and exacting ideal of public life and its responsibilities, and it is just because he has lived in that spirit that he has saved his party from the demoralizations and vices that party government breeds. For the new Prime Minister's sense of party has been very different from that which animates Mr. Balfour.

He has understood by party not a miscellaneous collection of interests, to be maintained by any means, and at any cost to public causes or the spirit of truth, but a set of men united in the defence of common principles. Under his leadership the party has not lost its identity, its continuity, its inspirations, or its grasp of the great purposes without which a party degenerates into a faction.

The task which has confronted Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman the last six years needed two qualities more than any others: courage and conviction. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had both. His masculine belief in freedom had not been undermined by the bad influences that had worked so much mischief in many quarters. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman once called himself an Old Englander, meaning by that term that he belonged to those Liberals who believed in self-government. The England of his fancy had no quarrel with freedom. This spirit governed his attitude to the Boer War. From the first he condemned the temper and aims of the ascendancy party, the party which, led by Lord Milner, sought to rule both our colonists and our neighbors by the methods of that Prussian school in which British Imperialism learnt its manners and its language. Against that doctrine Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman maintained an unfaltering protest, and he has seen its gradual disintegration. There was no ambiguity about Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's position, though Mr. Chamberlain tried, by presenting two grotesque alternatives, as if they exhausted the possible attitudes, to convict him of hesitation. He condemned the policy that provoked the war; he accepted annexation (wrongly as we think), in common with the majority of Liberals, as the least desperate issue to a dreadful predicament; he opposed everything that in

clined to the brutalities of power, and more than any living man he arrested the worst evils that marked our war and policy. There are some men to whom unpopularity is a not uncongenial tonic. Sir Henry CampbellBannerman, urbane, courteous, almost retiring, had by nature no more fancy for abuse than he had for fame. But he had to make himself one of the best hated men of his day. It is curious that at this moment the most abused man in each party has emerged with the highest reputation-Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Lord Lansdowne. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has braved calumny and vituperation, not, as some curious persons supposed, because he thought that either he or his party had some advantage to gain from doing and saying unpopular things, but because he felt it would be treason to his country to keep silence. speech which made the Government reform the camps will be remembered in history as the bravest act of patriotism in our time, and it is no small gain to the country that the man who carried the flag of English chivalry through that hissing crossfire of slanders should have lived to become Prime Minister and to receive the highest honors English politics can bestow.

The

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has another great advantage from a democratic point of view. He is outside that smart intellectual society round which a great deal of English politics centres. As Mr. Sidney Low has pointed out, aristocratic Government has become more then ever, as Bagehot would have said, "a form of thought" in English politics. We hope this régime is about to break up and that the government of the country will pass into a larger custody. No man could better mark that transition than the new Prime Minister, who has kept aloof from all the enervating influences

of English social life. His record as a Liberal shows that he will serve the country with a consistent public spirit and an unflinching respect for freedom. His record as a Minister shows that he The Speaker.

will serve it with tact, ability, and a fine disregard for those social superstitions that have governed the mind of his predecessor.

There has been in recent years a quality of unexpectedness in foreign affairs which, at a moment when leaders everywhere are obviously trying to mark time, is worthy of general notice. Until they perceive it, observers, however cautious, are apt to find their judgments perplexed, and that forward view which all of us involuntarily take to seem unreasonably ill-founded. No one, for instance, quite expected the result of the Russo-Japanese War. A few men, generally statesmen or soldiers, were more or less aware of the fighting strength of Japan; but even they, we believe, expected a kind of stalemate arising from the reluctance of both Powers to go on spending without a decisive result. At least onehalf of them looked forward, when they tried to forecast, to some manifestation of the gigantic, though torpid, strength of China, and a consequent alteration in the main conditions of the game. No one expected, we think, that Japan would be so entirely victorious, both by sea and land, as to wake up all the latent elements of revolution in Russia, and render the whole European prospect for the future doubtful or obscure. Later on very few, scarcely any, guessed at the absence of fury, the marvellous selfcontrol, of the Japanese statesmen and ruling classes, which enabled the Government to make a sensible peace by giving up the one clause in the terms upon which the hearts of the majority of the Japanese people-and probably 1556

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XXIX.

of the soldiers, who expected a great donative-were strongly set. When peace had been declared, hardly any one looked for the next event, the emphasizing of the entente between France and Great Britain-that is, in fact, between France and Great Britain and Japan--which woke the German Emperor out of a dream, and at all events seemed to make peace on the Continent secure. And then the revolution in Russia. All who discuss that now say they expected that; but what they did expect was an émeute, or at least partial mutiny, among the defeated soldiery. They never expected mutiny among the sailors, followed by a rising, chiefly though not wholly passive, among the intelligent and the artisans before they had made an alliance with the peasantry, who in Russia constitute the most weighty division of the "people." And then, to take a smaller illustration of our thesissmaller, that is, because the result is not yet clearly visible-look at the "Austrian trouble." Every one competent to form an opinion expected that the passing of the Emperor Francis Joseph would be the signal for dangerous dislocations within the Austrian Empire; but who expected that they would come while that astute diplomatist, taught by half-a-century of defeat and success, still held the helm, and held it, too, with a hand that did not quiver; that, in fact, the three great races under his sceptre-Magyar, Slav, and German-would draw apart and