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a source of constant and bitter comment; for the law of the Prophet forbids graven images. Moors did not declaim against them, for "the mouth which is shut, no flies enter"; but they listened to the licensed speech of the holy man. If the Pretender wishes to rouse an audience he does not tell them of the exactions of the pashas; he shows them a picture of the Sultan riding a bicycle. Corrupt governors are part of the recognized evils, but a Sultan who rides a bicycle and plays cricket is a threat to the established order, a man who may give to Europe the keys of the holy fort. And when word went round to the tribes that all men were to bring their rifles and the Sultan would pay for them, suspicion grew into certainty. The Sultan who issued such an order was preparing to give his country over tied and bound to the European. "We will give up our wives rather," answered the mountaineers of Anjera.

They may probably before long have to fight unavailingly to maintain the Macmillan's Magazine.

freedom which they cherish,-the right to shape their lives in their own way. Yet if the order which they represent is barbarism, I do not know that civilization will replace it for the better. In my ten days' stay at Laraiche I saw no man drunk, heard no brawling, met with no discourtesy, for I cannot blame a fanatic preacher for seeing in me a symbol of what he detested, and he answered courtesy with courtesy. And on the morning of my departure, when I stood at dawn on the deck of the little steamer in the river and heard the muezzin's cry come vibrating through the clear air,-the chant which at that moment ran through all the Eastern world-I could not but feel a sympathy for that religion which is at least believed in as scarcely any other by all its votaries. A friend of mine explained to his Moorish servant that the Japanese had no God. The boy laughed contemptuously: "Why," he said, "does their corn not grow?" It was as if you had asked him to believe that there was no sun in their sky. Stephen Gwynn.

THE RIGHTS OF SUBJECT RACES.

For the last hundred years the clashing demands of empire and nationality have been the leading problem of Europe the leading problem outside the other great problems of the food, shelter, and development of the workpeople, It was at the root of the Napoleonic wars, and since the collapse of Napoleon's empire it has dominated European diplomacy. It is still the chief danger to European peace. Sometimes the ideal of empire has appeared to advance, sometimes the cause of nationality. The British, French, and Russian empires have largely increased their territory and their command over subject races. Germany has created

a new empire, holding sway over other races in Europe and Africa, and to a small extent in Asia. In the other hemisphere we have seen the United States taking a first step in imperialism, Among ourselves the ideal of empire has been greatly extended, and for some years it governed our politics, though ostensibly upheld for the advantage of our commerce and the good of the subject races themselves, while the old conceptions of the glories of conquest and lust for territory seemed to be slowly dying out.

Contrasted with these growing demands of empire, the triumphs of nationality have been equally remarkable,

Italy has shaken herself free from an alien empire, and from alien or Papal kings. The Turkish empire has been compelled to shed at least six different nationalities, five of which now enjoy liberty almost complete. Austria has conceded something very near to independence for the Magyars, and will probably do the same for the Czechs. Norway, though never a subject race, has established her right of nationality as a separate kingdom. Finland has re-asserted her liberties after Plehve's attempt to absorb her into an indistinguishable Russian empire. The South American States have achieved their freedom from the empires of Spain and Portugal. Finally, in our own empire, even Unionists are beginning to realize that it is impossible to govern Ireland without considering her nationality, and as to our outlying provinces, with the large exceptions of India, Egypt, and some native African districts, they have developed into national States that are in reality free and independent.

I am not pleading the advantage of belonging to small and free nationalities rather than to vast empires in which the attempt is made by some faroff central Government to reduce all its subjects to a dead level of language, thought, and custom. I only wish to show that, if empires have been extended, the ideal of nationality has grown with at least equal strength. History, in looking back upon the last century, already finds its favorite and most heroic figures in the men who have vindicated the rights of free nationality, rather than in those who have extended empires. The names of Byron, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth, and Parnell are the names beloved, and there have been many more. But my object in recalling them is to suggest that the kind of men whom history thus honors cannot be classed as reprobate outcasts beyond the protection of ordinary laws, or outside the usages

of average civilization. Yet, unless they are successful, that is how the supporters of a national cause are habitually classed and treated by the Governments of nearly all empires, and by their agents.

Unhappily, I can speak from a varied experience, both in times of nominal peace and in risings against oppression. I have seen how the Armenians under Turkish rule in Asia are being steadily exterminated or driven over the frontiers. I have seen something of the depopulation of the Congo, and the slavery in Portuguese Central Africa. I have seen the devastation and pillage and slaughter of Macedonia after the rising of 1903, and the similar devastation of the Georgian provinces at the foot of the Caucasus last year. have seen the Nationalists among the Russian Poles and the Letts of the Baltic Provinces treated as no civilized Power would now venture to treat the troops or populations of any State but their own even in the most savage war. All this has happened within the last three and a-half years, and what one man can see represents a hardly perceptible fraction of what really occurs. I need not mention the Jews, whose sufferings are known to all the world. Nor do I try to shield our own empire by throwing blame on others. If I did, the dark rumors of Natal's methods in pacifying the Zulus would be brought up against me.

Such contradiction between the judgment of history and the common usage of most Governments is very remarkable. By Geneva Conventions and The Hague Conventions, the chief nations among mankind have agreed to regulate the methods of warfare in accordance with the "the usages established between civilized nations, the laws of humanity, and the requirements of the public conscience." (See The Hague Convention of 1899, for War on Land.) But subject races have no

share in the advantage of these regulations.

The least that the civilized Powers can do is to agree to a convention with regard to subject races similar to The Hague Convention, from which I have quoted. Such a convention would not ensure good government or security from ordinary oppression, but it would gradually ensure a limit to the atrocities of punitive expeditions and the suppressions of risings. There would be no direct means of enforcing its opservance; there are no direct means of enforcing the terms of The Hague Convention as it stands. It all rests upon international public opinion-upon "the laws of humanity, and the requirements of the public conscience." But no one doubts that the cause of humanity has gained enormously by the mere statement and definition of the Convention's principles, and by the knowledge of each Power that a flagrant breach of its provisions will lead to exclusion from the comity of the civilized world. Ultimately this exclusion may even involve a refusal of loans, or a diplomatic boycott such as we imposed upon Servia after the murder of her late King.

Inevitably the cry of interference with internal affairs will be raised. It is the same cry as was raised when the right of slave-owners to "wallop their own niggers" was first questioned. Within fifty years that cry has completely died away, and the claim of

The Nation.

central Governments to torture, violate, slaughter in cold blood, and generally exterminate the members of a subject race will gradually be recognized as equally inhuman and absurd, even in times of rebellion. But, as a matter of history, the oppression of subject races has led to interference with internal affairs time after time. We, with other Powers, interfered on behalf of Greece eighty years ago, and on behalf of Crete ten years ago. France interfered on behalf of Italy in 1859, and Russia on behalf of Bulgaria in 1877, and five Powers are interfering, however feebly, on behalf of Macedonia now. The claim of Governments and empires to do what they like with their own, to practise any extreme of atrocity upon their subjects, and to disregard all the usages of civilized warfare in dealing with the rebellions and risings of subject races, has been the occasion of terrible wars within the last century; and for that reason alone, if for no other, the subject demands the attention of The Hague Conference. if it is too late now to extend the programme of the official delegates at the meeting in June, a subordinate and unofficial conference should be held simultaneously among representatives of the many British, European, and American societies, which have no other object to serve than the extension of freedom and the protection of the oppressed.

Henry W. Nevinson.

Or

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

The most hopeful symptom at present in the social politics of the United States is the attitude of the people towards President Roosevelt. That di vision of politics, as Mr. Roosevelt evi

dently wished to intimate in his speech at the Jamestown tercentenary, is in a confused, and even dangerous, condi. tion. Owing partly to that admixture of blood which, as the President pointed

out, has been continuous for three centuries, and partly to the enormous resources which Americans have discovered within their dominion, the dangers which now threaten it are not those which the founders of the Republic anticipated. They were great builders, and a hundred years after they were in their graves a million of men died to protect the Constitution which they had framed; but their foresight was not quite equal to their constructive capacity. The foresight of politicians rarely is. A few among them apprehended danger from the existence of slavery in their midst; but they did not foresee that slavery would produce in the South a civilization radically hostile to the civilization of the North, and they left the incipient cancer not cut out. A good many expected what used in our own country to be called "the ugly rush" of the masses against property, and provided against it in the Constitution itself; but none foresaw the industrial growth of the Union, or the bitterness which, under a régime of nominal equality, comparative poverty is certain to produce. It has produced it, nevertheless, to such an extent that strikes in the Union have frequently been petty civil wars which the State Militia have been unable to control; and no one, of course, foresaw such a development of wealth that many of its owners now rival the old Barons of Europe in audacity, influence, and, we must add, carelessness for any interests wider than their own. So savage have the differences of class become that the next election will be a struggle between the "Haves" and the "Have-nots," and the relation of the Trusts to the future of the Republic will be avowedly or secretly the pivot of the contest. There will be real danger, as the President acknowledges in his deeply significant speech of April 26th, that the Republic, which was to have been governed by a majority of more or less comfortable

freeholders, may pass under the sway either of a plutocracy or a mob. Either result, we need not say, would be fatal to the hopes which philanthropists throughout the world have founded on the growing prosperity and power of the great Republic,-the mightiest selfgoverning community which history records.

Amidst the many darkening clouds which are rolling up on the American horizon there is one definite spot of light. All depends upon the decision of the American people, who are, as the President says, in America the "sovereign" power, and the American people have decided that their real leader is Theodore Roosevelt. This is admitted by the opposite, or Democratic, party as much as by the Republicans who gave Mr. Roosevelt his place,-by those who distrust and detest his personality as much as by those who are devoted to his name. They all agree that if Theodore Roosevelt will stand for a third term resistance will be as impossible, or at all events as useless, as resistance to Abraham Lincoln proved to be at his second election in 1865. So intensely is this felt that Republicans denounce his threatened retirement as treason to the country, while Democrats believe that at the last moment he will be, as it were, stoned by opinion, and coerced against his Own judgment and his own wishes into once more standing for the chair. Study that fact in the light of his record, and you will see that the immense majority of the people, who constitute, as he himself says, the true Sovereign of the States, must be clean of the wish to support either plutocracy or mob-rule, that the people wish both to be avoided or put down, whatever the effect and whatever the sacrifice. This is the more remarkable because Mr. Roosevelt affronts and defies two other sections of the voters besides the

plutocracy and the mob; namely, those -and they are a multitude-who still consider State Rights more important than national claims, and those-and they also are a multitude-who profit by the most visible disease of America, the prevalence of corruption in the Governments of the great cities. If, as all Americans declare, the heart of the American people goes out to Theodore Roosevelt, the heart of the American people is still pure; and whoever has been corrupted by the over-sudden access of wealth or by the spread of economic fallacies, it is not the American Nation. Mr. Roosevelt has not had occasion to fight pecuniary corruption as openly and strenuously as he has fought the Trusts and mob-rule, but his sentiments on the subject-we may add, his resolutions on the subject-are thoroughly understood. The "bosses" dread and hate him as much as the multi-millionaires do, or the managers of the fighting Trade-Unions.

It is a little difficult either to explain or to understand the sudden magnitude which the two economic questions have attained in America. The amazing success of the syndicates of capitalists called Trusts is due no doubt at bottom to Protection, without which their profits would be too uncertain to tempt them into such combinations. That explanation cannot, however, be complete, for the railway magnates are not protected by the tariff, and when Protection was at its zenith in Great Britain there were no syndicates. There must be something else, probably the absence of the temptation which exists in Europe, when great fortunes

The Spectator.

have been accumulated to "go out of business," and assume dignified positions among the leisured class. The excessive fierceness of the industrials, again, may be due in part to the alien blood which for a century has been pouring into the States in a stream of increasing volume, and which is now to a great extent Latin and Slavic blood, and in part to the natural action of a Republic in making all its citizens hate the very idea of inequality. It is, however, a curious fact to be carefully remembered that Republicanism, with its corollary, the right of self-government, though it extinguishes many evils, such as the permanent terror which arises from autocracy and the permanent servility which often accompanies Monarchy, does not extinguish, or even greatly diminish, social dangers of an acute kind. Socialism is much stronger in France, where the Republic is obviously succeeding, than in England, where newspapers still record the comings and goings of Monarchs as if they were the most important of occurrences, and where titles are still sought with almost unintelligible avidity. The probable truth is that, as human beings cannot look forward even for a day with any feeling of certainty, the founders of Constitutions cannot provide against all the evils those Constitutions will produce, or foresee the cross-currents of thought and feeling which will modify the working of institutions. Scotland is probably the most truly democratic country in the world, but there is no country in which the aristocracy hold a loftier or a safer position.

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