tion, which was to be a Musée de la Révolution Française. This is the last change that the famous old court has seen, for a museum it remains to-day.

The work from 1880-1882 was in the hands of M. Edmond Guillaume, the Government architect, and he carried it out with great success. In the centre of the main wall, in front of the inscription which had survived all the changes and chances of ninety years since it had been first placed there by Gilbert Romme, M. Guillaume built a structure which frames the plaque. This creation is over 12 feet high and nearly 10 feet broad. On a platform in front of it stands the statue of Bailly, represented in the act of reading the oath. The names of all the seven hundred signatories of the procès-verbal which succeeded the oath are written on the wall, and there are on either side of Bailly's statue busts of twenty eminent men of the assembly. On the grille wall above the penthouse hangs a copy of David's famous picture. Round the room are a number of cases containing various inscriptions, plans, letters, etc., which have some bearing on the court and its history.

The Musée de la Révolution Française was opened with a banquet and speeches on June 20, 1883, the ninety-third anniversary of the taking of the oath. No doubt of every hundred people who visit it ninety-five are more interested in the museum than in the court itself. When I was last there with a friend the concierge in attendance showed himself woefully ignorant of the game. He solemnly assured us that tennis was quite obsolete in France. Only the day before we had both been watching competitions for the Racquet d'Or in the Paris courts, and my companion was himself competing in the final of the Coupe de Paris the next day.

The building has still much of the appearance of a tennis court, and a court of noble proportions. The penthouses are all intact; so is the tambour; the upper part of the gallery wall, the galleries themselves, and the upper part of the main wall, the side windows, and the flat roof are such as may be seen in several of the older English courts. How much of the original floor remains I do not know. There is one further point which is worth mentioning, that is, that no trace of a grille can be seen. Instead in this grille wall there has been placed an opening corresponding to the dedans. When, how, and why this came there I have not been able to discover.

E. B. NOEL

THE BOW OF ULYSSES

If one were to hazard a criticism with regard to the shipbuilding trouble which is disquieting the public mind, it would be that the lack of ships is mainly due to two causes--one of which is the neglect of the late Government to secure at the beginning of the war the full maintenance of the shipbuilding industry before all else, and the other is the inexplicable system, for whose introduction the present Prime Minister is chiefly responsible, of setting aside the heads of all industries and replacing them by amateur Government officials. In the furious haste to make a new army thousands of men were recruited from the shipbuilding yards and the marine engine shops, so that the production of ships, both men-of-war and merchant vessels, upon which all else depended, was checked and decreased. At the same time the Government took over the control of merchant shipping from the shipowners, thereby depriving the country of the services of the only men who understood a highly complex business, and at a later date placed the control of shipbuilding itself under a Government Department.

In the first stress of war it was natural that a Government which had never manifested any comprehension of the elements of sea-power, and which was driven out of its reckoning by the instant necessity of fighting a great land war, should fail to anticipate the need for ships. The submarine war on commerce had not then begun, nor was it foreseen. At the beginning, too, both the Government and the country supposed that the war would be over in three months or so, though Lord Kitchener put it at three years; and the Government, confronted with the choice between putting the whole nation on a war footing and of waging the war on civil conditions, decided to preserve the civil conditions of trade and commerce and to wage war on a peace footing. We now know that the decision was a mistake.

But having made their choice, and decided that a national war was to be conducted on the system which had served for the small professional army, under which a war was a profitable business for the sellers of war material and supplies, the Government had to consider how best that system could be expanded to fulfil the

needs of a national army. The right course was clearly to call the masters and men of every industry into council and to ask them to give their services to the country at a fair price.

But at this point enters the inexplicable. The Government chose to push aside the masters of industry, to ignore the men, and to create vast Departments to administer industries for the Government. Then began the largest experiment in State control of modern times, the Government having previously eliminated from the experiment the first condition of its success. For they had refused to mobilize the whole country in the service of the State, making every employer and every man a servant of the State, paid on a war footing. They retained the voluntary system and the system of commercial competition, and on the top of them imposed the vast inertia of State control by officials. That the loss of the war did not swiftly ensue is due to the loyalty and constancy of masters and men, who, hampered and hindered by State control, have continued indomitably to struggle with the work.

Land war in England is an improvisation. On land, England is the amateur meeting the professional. On the sea, it is the other way about. Germany has been perfectly aware of the position from the beginning. The fatal circumstance is that England herself was unaware of it, and is only now beginning to perceive the truth. Whether or not England is coming to her senses too late, remains to be seen. It is not too late at least to learn from experience.

Before the war there was a tradition, inherited from the Napoleonic campaigns, that if England kept the seas, all else should be added unto her. Even that tradition was rapidly decaying during the ten years preceding the war, and with it was departing the last remnant of a national policy. The people of England had been told until they were tired that Britain must be supreme at sea, because by reason of her supremacy at sea she had prevailed in the old wars. But while a great deal was said and repeated by rote concerning sea-power, the foundations of that sea-power which overcame the armies of Napoleon were never so much as mentioned.

In the days of the long French wars England was self-supporting, with a small and a hardy population, and few great manufacturing industries. Had the fleets of the enemy blockaded Britain, she would not have been starved for lack of bread and meat. Nor was her population decimated and exhausted by great campaigns on land, for her professional armies fighting abroad were small in numbers, and two or three hundred thousand men served to keep the sea. The end of the Continental wars coincided with the beginning of the new industrial and commercial

era in England, to whom the needy and impoverished nations came for iron, steel, coal, and every kind of manufactured commodity. Then began that fierce and implacable making of money, which kept the breeding millions enslaved in factories and mines, ruined the countryside, and enriched the buckram lords of commerce. The British gospel consisted of two commandments: buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.

What was the price of the cheapest market? The sacrifice of England's independence, which was the main foundation of her sea-power, by which she lived. For now must England be fed from abroad and draw her supplies of raw material from abroad, and even part with her coal, the motive-power of all industry, in exchange for foreign goods. In a word, England became dependent upon the foreigner; and her whole prosperity became dependent upon her sea-power, whose foundations had been undermined. The principle of production and of self-sufficiency had been exchanged for the principle of buying and selling and living on the profits of the transaction. The profits were enormous; although (with all deference to Mr. W. H. Mallock) they were the few and not the many who reaped the advantage.

It was the late Mr. Joseph Chamberlain who perceived something of the insecurity of the national position. But it is doubtful if he understood the cause of the disease. He prescribed a remedy for the symptoms, which he labelled Tariff Reform, and the country (rightly or wrongly) refused to accept it. The whole financial interests of the country were brigaded against a change in the fiscal system which undoubtedly created (for the few) vast wealth. That the wealth thus obtained was held by so fantastic a tenure that in a year or two years it might all vanish away, and turn, like fairy gold, to dead leaves, appeared incredible. Was there not the British Fleet? Was not our sea-power "unassailed and unassailable"? A few persons, and those the subject of revilings, saw that there was something even greater than the British Fleet, which was the strength of the nation, manifested by its power of production conferring welfare, not on the few, but on the many, and by its self-sufficiency. The roots of sea-power were being eaten away, and it is no marvel that sea-power itself should have begun to wither in the years before the war. For the whole gigantic fabric of English prosperity was based upon the assumption that there would be no more war.

In 1905 the members of the Royal Commission on the Supply of Food and Raw Material in Time of War who signed the Minority Report were so indiscreet as to ask what would happen if war did by any chance occur, and to give some very disagreeable answers. Naturally that document was immediately interred beneath the whole majestic pile of Government offices. Besides,

did not the Admiralty say there was no reason for apprehension, or no cause for alarm, and so forth, in the best official style?

The present writer would here refer to an entertaining and a sagacious little book written by Mr. Ian D. Colvin, called Take Cover, published at the offices of this Review. In the shadow of imminent destruction, the persons of the story discuss, each from his own point of view, their conception of the right conduct of a nation. As it is possible, and indeed occasionally happens, that an individual founds his conduct of life upon a wrong principle, although he believes it to be a right principle, so we may not unreasonably argue that a nation may do the same. It would perhaps be more exact to describe the individual as affirming admirable principles in theory, while in fact acting from halfconscious motives of an expediency, which he has never owned the moral courage to analyse. It is even possible that the principle may be morally wrong and the expediency morally right, although the individual does not know it. Such a case is the theme of the late Samuel Butler's excellent work, The Way of all Flesh, in which the chief actor in the story, for a great part of his life, thinks he is doing wrong when in fact he is doing right, as to his relief he subsequently discovers. The people in Mr. Colvin's Take Cover elucidate by conversation the discovery that they are doing wrong when they thought, in so far as they thought at all, they were doing right. It is an illustration of that sudden extension of consciousness which the psychologists tell us is both a cause and an effect of the war.

No book should be read for its moral; yet you should read Take Cover for that very purpose, if only for the pleasure of following the chain of reasoning. The conclusion may be simply expressed. It is that the first duty of a nation is to be selfsupporting and self-dependent, and that the achievement of these elements of virtue mainly resides in the power of production. Nor does the force of argument depend solely upon material conditions. More nearly considered, it is based upon morality. There can be no virtue except in action; the rest is nothing; and how can a nation serve either itself or others, until it is independent?

England, that once withstood the shocks of a world in arms, has become dependent on all other nations. Now it is proposed to prop her up on every side by assembling together a League of Nations, the most of which would gladly see England in the dust. But of what avail would be a League of Nations, unless each member of it were strong and independent and self-sufficing? It would be like a group of maimed men, each leaning on the other for support.

England, wealthy, dependent, and save for the Navy almost unarmed, like an obese old fighting man swaggering in steel