our investment market.

But our reading of the situation obliges us to regard Colonial Preferences more in the light of passing amenities than of permanent policy. Their endurance and enlargement will be found inconsistent with the liberty and elasticity which the Dominions will require for protection and negotiation.

But, it will be urged, if commercial union be found impracticable, Imperial sentiment and interest will find their realization in a close defensive and political union. Will they? First, take Imperial defence. It is quite true that the Dominions have now undertaken to relieve us of some of the burden of Imperial defence, which hitherto we bore unaided. Australia is planning a large fleet, which will place her in the front rank of naval Powers, and Canada is equipping herself powerfully for defence by sea and land. The other Dominions, each according to its needs and powers, are following suit. But are these preparations making for unity of Imperial defence? Not so. Canada and Australia have made it quite clear from the outset that they regard their fleet and army primarily as a national equipment for the defence of their own shores, and only secondarily as Imperial defence. They refuse to hand over the control of their forces to Imperial officers, and explicitly reserve the right to say whether they will take part in a conflict waged by the Imperial Government. The occasional presence of Dominion representatives at meetings of the Defence Committee, or the advice and assistance rendered by Imperial officers to Dominion Governments in their plans of national defence, must not deceive us into supposing that in this defensive, any more than in the fiscal, system of the Dominions, Imperial unity is the first consideration. Not the integration, but the disintegration, of Imperial arms is the actual issue of the new

movement by which our daughter nations are furnishing the instruments of national defence.

They

We are entirely free to admit that part of the motives inducing them to undertake their own defence has been a desire to relieve Great Britain of an excessive burden, coupled with a genuine wish to assist the Empire in any peril to which it may be exposed. But, had these motives been predominant, they would have led the five nations to contribute pro rata, on some basis of population or trade, to an Imperial army and navy, strengthened by a single purpose and complete unity of control. We do not blame them for reserving full autonomy as to the extent, the nature, and the control of their military and naval preparations. are right in using them as expressions and instruments of the continued assertion of national independence under the British flag. But this policy. taken with the fuller liberties, freely accorded by this country, of negotiating treaties with foreign States, and of exercising a determining voice in treaties made by the Imperial Government in which they are primarily interested, is bound to open up difficult questions of foreign policy. As a "Times" correspondent showed very lucidly the other day, grave international complications might arise from the new situation in which there will be five nations of equal political status, using the same flag, but claiming each a large, if not a complete, autonomy in foreign relations. For it is impossible to deny that the possession of so large a fleet as Australia is contemplating would carry with it an Australian foreign policy. Canada has already carried its treaty-making to a point which is stirring very difficult questions as to the unity of the British Empire as an international State.

All the more need, it will be said, for such an Imperial Council of State as

that which Sir Joseph Ward has proposed, and after crushing criticism from all his colleagues, has withdrawn. If our Empire is to hold together and to work with any unity of purpose, it would seem essential that some mode of systematic deliberation and discussion between representatives of the several compact realms must be devised. But the suspicion with which Sir Wilfrid Laurier viewed this proposal in the last Conference has obviously strengthened in the minds of the Premiers attending the present Conference. The proposal of a Council "advisory to the Imperial Government" would clearly have committed the Dominions to a closer responsibility for the Empire as a whole than they would find consistent with that independent nationalism which is their guiding principle. The Nation.

Formal advice involves re

sponsibility. Even had the members of such a Conference been moved by the spirit of enthusiastic loyalty and Imperial fervor to adopt a proposal establishing a new instrument of political government for the Empire, the peoples of these Dominions, when they realized what was conveyed in the acceptance of a "collective trusteeship" for its unfree portions, would have proceeded no further with it. They would have felt that it involved them in unknown hazards, against which their necessarily subordinate position on an Imperial Council could afford them no adequate protection. No; there has never been anything like the Empire of the Five Nations, and if it is to subsist it must obey the peculiar laws of its being. Its bonds are spiritual and sentimental, not governmental.

An extraordinary mental audacity, the result, as it would seem to the reader, of an intense mental energy, has led the new headmaster of Repton to attack in a short book, "The Nature of Personality” (Macmillan and Co., 2s. 6d. net), the three most difficult subjects in the world-the meaning of personality, the freedom of the will, and the existence and nature of God. Very many men will turn away from such an attempt. The mere headings of Mr. Temple's chapters will be enough to discourage them from reading his book. To continue arguing on such subjects is futile, they will say to themselves. Perhaps that is true, but to continue thinking on them is inevitable. Every man thinks upon them, unless he is so harassed by work, so distracted by pleasure, or so lost in sloth, that he never thinks at all. The reason so many of us no longer wish to

read of them is that we have groped painfully to the conclusion that all answers to such questions are to be sought for among the emotional intuitions. By those who struggle with all their heart and soul and strength these emotions may be wrought into convictions; but such convictions as cannot be resolved into logic cannot, therefore, be passed on, and may not, by their very nature, be imposed upon the intellect of others. So far as the physical world is concerned, a vast number of men have eluded the curse of Adam, and eat their bread in the sweat of other men's brows; but in the spiritual world this is seldom possible -we must labor for ourselves. On the other hand, the antithesis of what we have been saying is also true; the race of men is not only social but sympathetic, and a consensus of intuition will always have a serious bearing

upon the credibility of individual intui

tious. If all men in the world but one openly proclaimed themselves intuitively convinced of a future life the silent man would not long remain in doubt.

Mr. Temple is convinced that the recurrent waves of agnosticism are caused by the failure of theology adequately to express the common spiritual experience, all such expression tending to become an anachronism. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that all adequate exposition of the common intuitions partakes in greater or less degree of the nature of revelation. That is to say, it casts a light upon those dark ways of thought in which the fact that we are men and not animals mysteriously compels us to tread. While the vast majority acquiesce in the existence of a Creator, most men are distressed from time to time by the question of His Personality, for most of us must candidly admit that we cannot conceive of an impersonal God, which means that we cannot conceive of God at all except on human lines. We should not, perhaps, like to express ourselves as uncompromisingly as Mr. Temple does on the subject. All the same, he is giving voice to the general sentiment when he says: "We are agnostic in this, that we confess our inability to know the Supreme Being perfectly, but still we know quite certainly that He is more adequately expressed as a Person than as the mere sum total of the blind laws of nature." Clearly our author sees no a priori objection to the doctrine of the Incarnation. Upon this matter of the Personality of God Mr. Temple throws, at least for a moment, a spark of light. We quote from him at length:

Let us at this point bring together the various sides of Personality, on which, as far as we have gone, we have found human Personality to be

manifestly defective. First we noticed the distinction of a Person from either a Brute or a Thing, in that the person not only has interests, but has interest in past and future; but clearly this interest is, as a fact, limited on both sides by ignorance and narrowness of sympathy. At some quite arbitrary point, determined by our individual limitations, this interest fades away or breaks off. We have suggested to us as an ideal limit in the process from thing to Person, a Being Who should care for the whole of history. Secondly, we found that, whereas a Thing is determined externally-or almost altogether so a Person's individuality is as important a factor in determining his character and conduct as are the external forces. This points to an ideal case of a spiritual being wholly determined by himself. Thirdly, we found that a man is partly master of his own actions in the sense that to a certain extent his character as a whole controls all his particular impulses and desires; and the ideal is suggested of a Being wholly self-controlled and self-directing in this sense also. And lastly we have found that Personality as it exists in men requires subordination of the individual to a Purpose he cannot know; so that we reach the conception of a spirit knowing and willing the good of the whole world. In each of these four cases we find that only God can fulfil the whole requirement. Our process from things upwards finds its end in God or nowhere. Our Personality at any rate is an imperfect thing. If God exists, His Personality will be the true one, at least in those functions of Personality which we have so far considered.

Our author has already argued that Personality reaches its fullest development in Love--that is, in devotion to the good of others. Man, he declares, is most a Person when he is least a thing, and least a brute when, in fact, he develops benevolence. Proceeding, then, on the hypothesis that God is the climax of Personality, it follows that "it is the essential nature of God to spend Himself in Love of His World."

Sacrifice is part of love, and Mr. Temple, though dissatisfied with the common statement of the doctrine of the Atonement, here suggests its essential truth.

Another dark problem attacked by Mr. Temple concerns the relation of the past to the future. How can any future compensate for the sufferings and injustices of the irrevocable past? The old idea that everything is in some vague way to be made up to everybody is no longer satisfying. The present ways of God to men are not explained by the thought that some day those ways will be different. Here, again. Mr. Temple has something worth hearing to say. "The value of the Past is not irrevocably fixed," he declares, "it remains to be determined by the Future."

Now consider two plays, each in three acts, one proceeding from a cheerful opening, through a neutral phase, to a gloomy close; the other proceeding from a gloomy opening, through a neutral phase, to a cheerful close. It is by no means the case that in each play the first and last acts cancel each other, making a neutral effect on the whole; on the contrary, the former play is peculiarly depressingmore so than a play which is gloomy throughout; and the latter peculiarly exhilarating-more so than a play which is cheerful throughout. Yet this second play would have been depressing if it had stopped at the end of the first act. The emotional value therefore of that first act is quite different in isolation from its value when the two later acts are added: at its own close it has quite a definite value, but at the end of the play it has another value. The value, then, of any event in time is not fixed until the series of which it is a member is over-perhaps, therefore, not to all eternity.

On the subject of Free Will, Mr. Temple interests us less-probably because in his heart of hearts every man believes that he is free, and nothing that

can be said on the subject affects him more than superficially. Still, a good deal of ethical interest attaches to our author's words: "Will, as a separate entity, seems to me a fiction," he declares, and he quotes from Locke's celebrated chapter on "Power," where he points out that it is sensible to ask "Is man free?" or "Has man a will?" for these mean the same; but to ask "Is the will free?" is nonsense, for it only means "Has the power to choose got power to choose?"

The man who does something "on purpose" knows that in some sense he is free, but the power to act "on purpose" must, Mr. Temple thinks, be attained. The free man is the man who is not the creature of impulse.

But the man of strong will, as was said before, is not the man who may do anything, but precisely the man who can be depended on: in fact, strength of will reveals itself in certain splendid incapacities, as when it is said of a man accused of taking bribes-"He could not do it." People with no will at all like to attribute the variegations of their conduct to their freedom; one day a man chooses to be quite respectable; another day he chooses to be dissolute. But such choice is at best a mere rhythmic recurrence of various impulses, or the mechanical response to various environments or both.

The freedom revealed in "splendid incapacities" is a happy paradox, and whether Mr. Temple's argument touches the philosophic ground of the question or not matters little, since about that we are all agreed.

That our author's conclusions lead him to accept Christianity goes without saying. He is, however, able, in spite of deep, definite, and assured conviction, to sympathize with "them that are without." This is a very rare capacity in those who may be called orthodox. We hope that those of his readers who find in him an able

confirmation of a preconceived conviction will not, as they congratulate themselves upon the adherence of a new and able champion, omit to think over the following words: "We who, are Christians remember that the Godhead never shone forth in Christ so effulgently as in the moment when He felt Himself forsaken of God, and we The Spectator.

shall not think ill of those who, in the search for truth, fill up what remains of the sufferings of Christ."

Mr. Temple's little book will, we trust, be very widely read. It deserves all the readers it can get, for so liberal, so thoughtful and earnest, and so fearless an explorer of the truth is rare in these or indeed any days.

Mr. Frederick Lynch's "The Peace Problem" is an ardent and optimistic survey of the conditions of the problem and the grounds of hope of a satisfactory solution. The author's purpose is so good that it seems a pity that he could not have expressed himself in less slovenly English. Mr. Carnegie contributes an Introduction. Fleming H. Revell Co.

The boy scout movement is not very old, but it is certain to have a literature of its own. Among the first contributions to it is to be counted Rupert Sargent Holland's story "The Boy Scouts of Birch-Bark Island" a tale of wholesome and not at all impossible experience, in which the boyish love of out-of-doors and taste for adventure, intensified by the discipline and comradeship incident to the boy scout movement, work out good results and incidentally afford an opportunity for many enjoyable times. J. B. Lippincott Company.

The lovely wilful daughter of а London cab-proprietor; a young cabdriver enamored of her; a baronet halfcrazed with remorse because his family wealth was made in the slave trade and ridding himself of it as fast as possible by quixotic philanthropies; his high-spirited son, applying his father's ideas of social equality to his own ro

mance in a fashion quite unexpected by the older man; a penurious boarding-house mistress; a witty, well-preserved dowager-duchess-these, and a motley group of minor characters come within the sphere of influence of "The Old Dance Master," whose quaint, kindly personality William Romaine Paterson portrays in his novel of that name. Written in leisurely fashion, with ample time for comment and digression, the story is of the old type which is lately enjoying a new popularity. Little, Brown & Co.

Readers who enjoyed Moira O'Neill's article "About Marie-Claire," which was reprinted from Blackwood's Magazine in The Living Age for June 10th, I will be interested to know that the George H. Doran Company of New York are the American publishers of Mr. J. N. Raphael's translation of that remarkable book which has attracted SO much attention abroad. Arnold Bennett furnishes an introduction. The London Nation announces that Madame Marguerite Audoux, the author of "Marie-Claire," is engaged upon a long novel, which will give a picture of the lives of shop-girls and factorygirls in Paris, and that she has also in hand a shorter work, "La Valserine," which deals with smuggling on the eastern frontier.