The latter results for the year 1920 show colonial schools in possession of the first eighteen places. The nineteenth place is occupied by a Perthshire team of Boy Scouts, the next British institution, after a very long interval, being a detachment of Naval Cadets.

These shooting results the Englishman in the colonies is regretfully compelled to attribute to unabashed, and inexplicable, slackness on the part of the school authorities in England, but the general physical superiority of the colonial youth must be attributed, like most other things in this wide world, to heredity and environment.

Hereditarily, the colonial boy is descended from the physically sounder and more virile members of the European community, who, in the past, alone adventured colonial life. I refer, of course, to the colonials of some two or three generations' standing; the fat swindlers who of recent years have crowded the saloon decks of the mail-steamers are generally birds of passage, and such as have decided, since colonial life has become less hazardous, to live and procreate in the colonies can scarcely be looked upon as typical colonials. Speaking very roughly, therefore, the colonial is an example of the survival of the physically fittest. There was indeed reason for the considered opinion of Professor Jebb, given when visiting South Africa with the British Association, that the Africander was the finest extant specimen of the white race.

The environment includes a life almost entirely lived in the open air. The inevitable residuum of a boy's day, when the lessons are over and the organized games played, is, in the colonies, spent outside; in England, in reading. To be perforce thrown upon the desultory browsing among books, as a resource for the spending of his time; to be born, like Epaminondas of old, inter literas, falls to the lot of few colonials. Out-of-door life is practically always available and always attractive, and the results, morally and mentally, are far-reaching.

To the colonial boy books are always "of his life a thing apart," never, as to so many English boys of a certain class, his whole existence." Intensely matter of fact, he will learn what is set him to learn with a Babu-like singleness of mind-and lack of understanding. To mathematics his matter-of-factness gives him some inclination, provided they be of the less advanced variety, but of intellectual originality or literary appreciation he knows nothing.

Less subtle and less complicated than his English cousin, he takes a shorter time intellectually to gestate, and has

at eighteen reached his maturity; but the colonial of eighteen is as much a man as he will be at forty. Self-questioning, quixotry, diffidence and whimsicality you will rarely find in a colonial. I have seen The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne played before a colonial audience, and I have read the earlier part of David Copperfield and the essays of Charles Lamb with a High School Sixth Form. The lack of comprehension, in each case, amounted to little else than a pitying contempt for such insignificant futility. With no slightest sense for " letters, the colonial youth finds the written word "magnificent because unknown," and his consequent docility renders him excellent material to the schoolmaster avid for results-and the despair of him who would hope for intellectual response.

"Post-war

Morally, the result is no less interesting. Debutante," in the article referred to, speaking of English girls, says: "They know less than nothing of the questions with which they will have to deal, the moment they have any home of their own. Indeed, I have known some marry who have never been allowed to do anything for themselves by the too fond parents who kept them in cottonwool. They had hardly taken a railway-ticket and had never been on their own' anywhere-they had lived under ceaseless and rather oppressive chaperonage. They were practically never out of sight of some nervous elder. I should have thought that what is needed is that the children should be less catered for, and taken somewhat more seriously as regards things that matter."

Exactly the opposite state of affairs obtains in the case of the colonial youth. There is no nursery; from babyhood he lives almost entirely in the society of his elders, hears, and understands, their conversation, and appreciates their difficulties-in parts of Natal it is no uncommon thing for children to address their parents by their Christian names. The mystery which of old-time

clothed our elders is non-existent.

The nervous elder," the "excessive catering," is rare indeed. Other things being equal, inhibitions are in themselves undesirable; and the colonial child experiences few of the continual "dont's," the categorical prohibitions, the injunctions and thwartings which fall to the lot of his English cousin. He is left far more to what Herbert Spencer calls "Nature's method in morals." Earlier in life he learns to appreciate the "stern but beneficent discipline of Nature," and to respect her laws; he is ready to "do or die," but he does not like to be ignorant of the "reason

why." The consequence is, when he reaches adolescence, increased reliability. Compare, for instance, the behaviour in Britain of the Springbok Rugby Teams, and that which, to the bitter regret of Englishmen out here, characterized at least one British team touring South Africa. The excessive regimentation of English life, its large population and its industrialism render discipline and self-suppression inevitable. In the colonies these features are almost entirely absent, and the colonial, protestant against that of which he cannot see the necessity, resents discipline. Morally he is a law to himself. The recent Australian objection to the regulation field-punishment of the British Army, viewed in the light of the magnificent personal gallantry displayed by the Australians in the war, is most illuminating. It is akin to the reply of the Canadian small boy, when ordered by his mother to "wash his face""Damn it, mother, I'm only four!"

English life is more hierarchic than is colonial life. The colonial fails to recognize social hierarchies, and a private shows less reverence towards his officer, the son to his father and the small boy to the big boy than in England. The prefect system in the colonial school is an alien institution which the colonial character foredooms to failure.

The Englishman's home is his castle; a colonial's home is his dormitory. Family ties are, in consequence, much less strong. The long winter evenings spent by an English family in the exclusive society of its members are almost unknown in the colonies. The colonial boy and girl are less tied by necessity to their homes; they see far more of the outside world, and the almost patriarchal character of British domestic discipline is absent, as is the almost fiercely jealous love of their own homes possessed by so many British women of all classes.

And, if I read aright the article of "Post-war Debutante," the war has to a great extent de-industrialized, de-domesticated and de-regimented England. During war-time domestic discipline was perforce largely relaxed and England became colonialized. Her young men and her maidens tasted freedom; they were faced with actualities, and much that was artificial and hierarchic broke down. This, I gather, is behind the change of outlook of the younger generation in England, a change so alarming to many of the older generation.

In so far as this change means an advance in selfreliance, an increasing refusal to accept the moral law

from without, and a disinclination to hearken to the ipse dixit of priest and elder, this is all to the good. In so far as it may prove to be incompatible with the essence of English life, it cannot survive.

In comparison with so many thousands in England, the colonial is spoilt by his climate and by the comparative absence of competition which he enjoys.

You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played on the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls

To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

A country where severe industrial and intellectual competition exists must needs suffer such exaggerated discipline and self-suppression. But perhaps the whirligig of time will record a converse process to that which we have seemed to see, and perhaps the colonies, increasingly populated, increasingly industrialized and increasingly regimented, will become anglicized, with the result that the differences which at present obtain between the colonial and the British youth will disappear.

In the meanwhile, such differences as I have attempted to outline are of the greatest interest to the observer of youth, and we can but think that in their variety lies a source of strength to the Empire.

G. H. LEGGOTT

Non in dialecticâ salvum fecit Deus populum suum (Not by logic hath it pleased God to save His people).-ST. AMBROSE.

Formal logic is rather a negative and a verifying than a positive and discovering process, and represents only a very small part of the actual operation by which we are guided, and necessarily guided, in all practical judgments. -An Agnostic's Apology, p. 210.

ROMAN CATHOLICS are great on what they call their "logic," and not a few people give it as their reason for joining the Latin Church that her position is a more rational one than that of Protestants. They consider themselves unequalled judges of sound arguments,† and exult in the beautiful symmetry of their dogmas as compared with the distressing inconsequence, the makeshift patchwork character, which are the blemish of other creeds. Those poor Protestants are very good fellows in their way, but they are so hopelessly illogical: the man in search of really puissant reasoners must have recourse to the theologians of the Romant Church.

"The world is governed by logic," says Mr. Augustine Birrell in the laudatory essay upon his favourite hero, Cardinal Newman, entitled "The Via Media." When Mr. Birrell says "the world" he probably means that part of the world outside the British Empire, because the average Briton has always refused to submit to logic's sway. John Bull,"the cloudy-browed, thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no logic utterance," as Carlyle calls him, somehow manages to blunder into wisdom, because he has in him "what transcends all logic-utterance: a Congruity with the Unuttered. The Speakable, which lies atop, as a superficial film, or outer skin, is his or is not his but the Doable, which reaches down to the world's centre, you find him here!"§ Even if it be true that the via media is a blind alley leading nowhere, he will still follow it, believing that the middle road is still the safest, and that it is better to land nowhere than to land in a bog you cannot get out of.

* A chapter from the author's new book, Priestcraft, which will be shortly published by the National Review.

†The Month (December 1919) declares that "we Catholics are unequalled judges of the soundness of arguments, and are not at all the sort of people who are able to content ourselves with such as are not really sound."

Obiter Dicta, First Series.

§ Past and Present, p. 137.