there is a certain grim irony in reflecting that step by step with the pauperising of the masses went the growth of English wealth and of the English empire during the last century.

All the grave questions which face Englishmen at the present day, the enormous propertyless proletariat, the power of the capitalists, the inefficiency and corruption of Parliament, the incoherence and instability of the British Empire and last but not least the menace of a resurrected and remembering Ireland, are traced and set forth by Mr. Belloc fearlessly and uncompromisingly. And his medicine for the body-politic? It is as original and as fearless as his diagnosis, and it comes very strangely from a man of Mr. Belloc's democratic temper. It is nothing else than the revival of the power of the throne. It is Mr. Belloc's conviction that "today the future of England depends on whether or no the power of the Crown can be revived once more."

But his pages on Irish History are the portion of his book that will be read with keenest interest on this side of the Irish Sea. We all know the treatment Ireland gets in the usual history of Great Britain--an odd paragraph here and there or a belated and skimpy sub-section in which the doings of the Protestant ascendancy are chronicled and the mass of the Celtic population dismissed in a few contemptuous sentences. Mr. Belloc's attitude towards Ireland is singularly fair and his strictures on English incapacity and injustice are hearty enough to satisfy the most pronounced Irish Irelander. His sketch of the condition of the Irish people about the middle of the eighteenth century, "the dark period of Irish History," is one of the best things in the book. The survival of the Irish race and Irish nationality he regards as historically unaccountable. "Personally," he says, "I regard it as miraculous." For the Irish policy of English ministers, a policy consistently short-sighted and criminal, he has othing but vehement blame. And this not merely through sympathy for Ireland, but because he sees that none of her sins will call for such retribution from England as her treatment of Ireland. He points significantly to the contrast in development between the two countries-a contrast due primarily to their different religions, for it is one of Mr. Belloc's theses that Protestantism breeds Capitalism. Eng

land for all its wealth, its huge output and its great empire is really the poorest and most unsettled country in the world. While on the contrary Ireland's development has been consistently towards the healthiest conditions-it has been completely agrarian, and for those who would make light of the threat of a resurrected and economically sound Ireland, it would be well to bear in mind two considerations. In the first place the scanty population of Ireland is not the result of any natural and permanent set of conditions, but of a deliberate economic policy on the part of England, a policy which is no longer practicable. And secondly the disproportion between the two countries even in population is not so great as would appear at first sight. "It is agricultural Ireland," says Mr. Belloc, "that must be compared with agricultural England as a whole; the permanent Ireland with the permanent England: ephemeral accretions of urban population though considerable in effect must never be taken at their full value and the immense increase of urban England during the last century must not disturb our general judgment as to the relation between the two islands." The true ratio of population between the two countries Mr. Belloc believes to stand normally in the proportion of one to three. And this proportion he finds to apply not alone to the population but in many other forms, such as "the number of distinguished men in various professions, in the less calculable effect of opinion, speech and writing upon Europe."

Mr. Belloc does not tell us what he thinks of the movement for the revival of the Irish language. But his general attitude towards Ireland and his views of nationality leave us in no doubt on the question. It is needless to say that he is thoroughly in favour of Home Rule.

As we have said this is a very notable book: it is probably the most fearless and keenest analysis of the condition of modern England that has been written. Whether Englishmen will listen to Mr. Belloc we do not know; but we hope that his words on the treatment of Ireland will not be without their influence. At any rate we are very grateful to him for what is the most sympathetic and uncompromising exposition of the Irish Question which we have yet read in an English History.

H. K.

AROON

Cold flows the sea about her feet,
The wide salt sea that hems her in;
Cold on her face the tempests beat:
That face with loss and longing thin.

Her tall and comely sons are driven
To alien fields far o'er the foam;
Her daughters from her arms are riven,
Never again to see their home.

In countless thousands through the years,
She sees them go, a sad-eyed band,
With breaking hearts and blinding tears,
For ever from the dear old land.

Never again to see her face

Wet with the west wind's vernal kiss; Never to feel her soft embrace

Dear God! What wrings our hearts like this!

With streaming hair and naked feet,
Upon her ancient hills she runs;
Where dawn and darkness softly meet,
She beckons to her scattered sons.

Far from the cliffs of Donegal,

Far from the stormy coasts of Clare,
They hear her low, insistent call,
And dream of glory--or despair!

Mother of unfulfilled desires,

The sorrow in thy starry eyes,
That burn with unextinguished fires,
Still kindles love and high emprise!

J. SCOTT.

ENGLISH PROSE STYLE:

HINTS ON HOW TO ACQUIRE IT

S this your own work, sir?" roared an irate dominie to a grubby and timid small boy handing in what he and the schoolmaster had conspired to call an Essay, Essay," is it original?"

I forget at this interval of time my exact perjury then, but I would like some bad old retired schoolmaster, now about to join my tutor in the shades (for his method of teaching he will be found between Sisyphus and the daughters of Danaus) to convey as my answer the substance of what will follow :

"Referes ergo haec, et nuntius ibis

Pelidae genitori: illi mea tristia facta

Degeneremque Neoptolemum narrare memento:
Nunc morere."

What is originality, my dear sir, and who is original? Define originality. Is it always a boon, a thing to be desired? Is not Walt Whitman more original in some bad ways than Shakespeare and Martin Tupper than Milton? Suppose we try to breathe in some original way, say with water through the left ear, are you sure it would be an improvement on the old hackneyed method of plagiarising oxygen from the air? Or let us endeavour to walk in an original way. There is at the present moment a man returning from market and trying to pass my window who seems to hold ideas about a new gait. He rose upon my fifty yards' horizon some ten minutes ago, and he is still inventing new steps. His originality has just brought him to grief I see, after he tried to put his right foot into his left trousers pocket. Even that is not original, for his

brother did just the same last Saturday week.

Or let us take the case of the gardener, who in his thirst to be different from other horticulturists, his fellows, would plant his cabbages upside down.

Even you, sir, in your methods of teaching were, I submit, not original. You will perhaps remember having read in a scholastic paper (sent you as a sample but to which you never subscribed, to our loss) that original composition in one's native tongue is as valuable an exercise as composing dog-Latin or Boeotian Greek, how you bounced in upon us one day with," Boys you will write an Essay in English. The subject is A Country Walk or else A Cricket Match. I see they are now setting English Essays at your examination. Bring in your Essay by Monday, your own original work mind, or I shall cane any wretched boy who doesn't." This you will remember was all the teaching I ever got from you in English Composition. I got the caning in addition because I began with the Country Walk and ended with the Cricket Match: this was your sole criticism upon my work and it was good criticism, still I submit that there was nothing original about it. Nor was there any originality in your handling of the literary masterpieces, which some sensible examiners had prescribed as our work for the year. I left your hands with my literary taste so far developed as to have a vague notion that the Gospels, and Homer and Aeschylus were written for the purposes of the Cambridge Local Examinations. Luckily for me I discovered Shakespeare and Horace and Tennyson without your aid, and with them Captain Marryat and Dickens, a strange mixture, but this is as it was. Luckily for me that even your teaching could not wholly prevent the sublimity of the Prometheus Vinctus, or the literary charm of the Aeneid oozing through your examinational futilities of second aorist forms and jussive subjunctives. And your French master was as lazy and incompetent a humbug as yourself!

Yet doubts assail me whether what I write is not want of charity and want of sense, for I did have admittedly one excellent teacher, a dear kind patient man who turned out some excellent mathematicians, and yet my own mathematics is the only thing original about me.-I do not wish