ingenious French pessimist Gobineau, with his Inequality of Human Races, insisting that our civilization was doomed to decay because the godlike aristocratic castes were being absorbed by the inferior races, the mean-spirited multitude, autochthones, creatures of the soil. And before Gobineau there was Carlyle, with his passionate hero-worship, and that angry revolt against the shams and futilities of weakness which led him to admire even such a savage old ruffian as the father of Frederick the Great. Before Carlyle, again, there was Machiavelli, who taught that men in the mass being for the most part "a sorry breed," were only fit to be bullied, driven, and deceived by the stronger and more subtle spirits, like that of the amiable Cæsar Borgia. And long before them all was Aristotle, who settled the whole question by dividing the human kind into those who were free and destined to mastery, and those who were "slavish by nature," and in consequence were justly enthralled and exploited by the others. The doctrine is as ancient as history, and there were ingenious sages justifying it on moral and religious grounds a few thousand years before Darwin had told us about natural selection and the survival of the fittest, and before Nietzsche and Treitschke had assisted Prussian generals and ministers to discover that "the State is Power," and that war is a "biological necessity," especially when you think you can wage it with

success.

To return to our Superman as Hero. He had its uses under the older conditions, though now his functions have become largely atrophied. Individual leadership in civil, and particularly in military, matters was much more important than it is at present. A campaign was to a considerable extent a game of skill, in

which almost everything depended on the cleverness of the principal player on either side. The issue might be decided by a single battle, and the battle itself by some sudden welldirected movement of a small body of men, the choice of a good position, the adroit seizure of some useful bit of ground, the ability to grasp the psychological moment for advance or retirement. It was a stroke of that sort, a stroke of genius if it were not perhaps sheer luck, which made for victory or staved off defeat. With small, mobile armies, fighting at close quarters, leadership was everything, and

the leadership was necessarily that of an individual.

Macaulay says that an army has sometimes been successfully directed by a fool or a coward, but never by a debating society. In the present war all the armies are directed, more or less, by debating societies. They are much too large and much too complex in their organization to be controlled by an individual, however comprehensive his talent. For the War Lord we have had to substitute the War Board, for the towering commanding personality, the Committee. Strategy, supply, equipment, transport, military economics, are now beyond the grasp of any single mind, though it were the mind of a Napoleon, a Carnot, and a Julius Cæsar rolled into one.

In war, as in industrial transactions, what is wanted is the harmonious co-operation of a number of managing persons, none of them necessarily gifted with genius, but all well-trained, well-informed, and clear-thinking. The excessively forceful, self-assertive intelligence may be a hindrance rather than a help on a committee. You do not want the Superman there; he would be likely to make trouble. The Board will do best when its members are on about a general high level of character and capacity, and have sufficient

confidence in one another to work together in comfort. With a directing council of this kind a great business concern a railway, for instance, or a steamship company-will be well managed; so likewise will be an army or a nation, both of which are also aggregates of human beings organized for industry. The Hero is here a luxury— sometimes a dangerous superfluity. Sir Walter Raleigh has recently told* a story of a Winchester boy who was "swanking" about his school, and was told that it had at any rate produced few men of genius. "I should think not," responded the Wintonian, "we would soon knock anything of that sort out of them." It was a very English reply: English in its distrust of intellectual superiority; English also in its instinctive belief that it is safer to rely upon a good average of efficiency than on the occasional revelation of brilliant, and perhaps abnormal, ability.

The Hero had other uses. He was a great instrument of suggestion, and man is a suggestible animal. Schooled as he has been by centuries of autocratic rule and anthropomorphic religion, he finds it easier to receive the suggestion when it comes to him through a personal agency. He makes a Person of his country, a Person of his god. He may, it is true, fight and die for an abstract idea: men have suffered martyrdom and tortured one another over the placing of a diphthong or the date of a church festival. The combative and the self-sacrificing appetites can thrive on a slender diet. But they grow more robust when they can feed on something that is made in their own image. The Great Man or the Superman, human or semi-divine, focuses the imagination and kindles the flame of enthusiasm. Loyalty to a Throne came more naturally to people

*See the report of his lecture at the Royal Colonial Institute in United Empire for January, 1917.

in the mass than loyalty to a Cause: they were happiest when they saw the cause, or thought they saw it, personified in the king.

Even nations that had outgrown the habit of despotism had that feeling, so that the noblest souls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were content to give up everything, including their lives, for an elderly flirt like Queen Elizabeth, or an obstinate and confused intriguer like Charles I. Men have shown as much devotion to the city, the state, or the republic, to Athens, to Sparta, to the United Provinces; but this was mostly in the case of small communities, where it was clearly present to the minds of all the citizens that their own personal safety, their lives, and wives, and property depended on the success of the corporate effort. When the entire population of a town was liable to be murdered in cold blood, or sold into slavery, if the hostile army were victorious, no artificial stimulus to patriotism was needed. The people of Carthage were unwarlike and softened by luxury and wealth; but they worked and fought with frantic energy in the final siege, for they knew what desperate doom lay before them when Scipio's forces got possession of the city.

The Personality may be dispensed with when the Cause comes clearly home to everybody, and is intelligently apprehended by all. Perhaps our Committees and Joint Commissions and Advisory Councils will appeal to that kind of corporate consciousness in the future. There is more sense of it in this war than in almost any great war of the past. The armies know what they are fighting for: they have an ethical and political creed, indefinite but substantial, and require no "magnetic" leadership to stimulate their imagination.

But here we are dealing with armed hosts of men who read, and even, in

some sort, are beginning to think. Idol-worshipping is growing obsolescent. Carlyle's Hero as Prophet and Priest and King is a little out of date. "I said the Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame." But "the rest of men" count for more in these days, and can flame with their own internal heat; they stand less in want of Prometheus, the bringer of fire from Heaven-or elsewhere.

In that acute (and now, I think, almost forgotten) book of the early 'nineties, National Life and Character, by the late Professor Charles H. Pearson, the author vaticinates gloomily on the "Decay of Character," presently to be brought about by state socialism, religious scepticism, scientific progress, democracy, journalism, the emancipation of women, and other perilous modern developments. The future, he anticipates, will give smaller scope than the past to individual eminence. When we are all properly educated we shall stand less in awe of the learned man. When most of us have a reasoned acquaintance with the art of politics we shall be disinclined to go down on our knees to the "statesman." When we are all fairly comfortable and fairly contented we shall not strive so feverishly for power or fame or money; and consequently ambition, "that last infirmity of noble mind," will be curbed. The noble mind will have less incentive to excel, and even the Greatest of Great Men will hardly be gratified by such successes as his predecessors achieved. A Cæsar, a Napoleon, a Richelieu, a Chatham will be denied his opportunities; he will not be allowed to make or unmake kingdoms, to wage wars on his own account, to impose his will upon millions, to fill the center of the world-stage.

"Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed" will be employed in drawing up agenda for a Joint Board or writing out memoranda for an Advisory Committee. Instead of the Conqueror we shall get the Chairman; the dominating, egotistic Will-toPower will be replaced by the trained, experienced, conciliatory Intelligence. Organized co-operative effort will be substituted for the brilliant stroke of genius. Even in science and scholarship the field open to individual achievement is narrowing: the space is so vast and subdivision so minute. It takes a dozen careful professors now to write a History of England; each has his "special subject"; he would hardly dare, as Hume and Lingare did, to run the whole off his own pen. The great modern inventions are not now thought out and completed by a single man, an Arkwright, a Watt, a Stephenson. The telephone, the aeroplane, the motor-car, the turbine, the radiotelegraph, were the results of a whole series of experiments and essays by separate investigators. The time may come when it will need six highly specialized literary gentlemen to compose a novel or a play. Indeed, we seem to have reached that stage already with the musical comedy and the revue.

Professor Pearson watched the beginning of the process with desponding eyes. He thought it promised a somewhat prosaic world, in which even the most imposing events would be transacted in a dull fashion, unilluminated by the flash and sparkle of coruscating personalities. Perhaps he was right. The Great Man-even the Eminent Person-touches an element of the picturesque, the dramatic, which we do not spare without a certain regret. Average competence is less attractive. Take the war, this most tremendous of all wars. Some people, I am told, find it dull; which is as amazing to

me as that one person-even if that person is only a tired paradox-monger like Mr. Bernard Shaw-should find it funny. But one can see that the tragedy of bloodshed and intolerable weariness would be sensibly relieved if we could concentrate on an Alexander, a Hannibal, a Turenne, a Marlborough, or some other fascinating figure from the minor conflicts of the past. But now the great captain can no more make a campaign out of his own head than a great engineer unaided can make a battleship. Modern warfare, like modern science, is an affair of co-operation and co-ordination, of large ordered plans shaped in concert by many minds, rather than the expression of any one supreme, imperious Will. It is like a novel without a hero, or a history of institutions; works which are seldom popular. Character is easier to follow than ideas, and people, especially semi-educated, half-uncivilized people, would sooner talk of persons than of tendencies and forces. That is why a good part of the most interesting history looks like a sort of glorified gossip.

There will be a waning charm in Fortnightly Review.

this indolent indulgence when society is organized into groups of men and women, working together for great, impersonal objects. Perhaps the depressed prophets are justified in thinking that the world will be less romantic then, so far as romance depended on the clash and play of human idiosyncrasy. There will be individuality enough; but the outstanding "sport" may be of infrequent occurrence. There may be more all-round talent, less genius; fewer fools and weaklings, if also fewer conquerors and saints. This will be against the Superman, but it will make for the coming of the Superrace. For the rise of any species in the scale is not due to the crushing out of the inferior elements by the favored exceptions, but to the enlargement of the powers and capacities of the general body. Human evolution is a more pacific and a more democratic process than the Mendelian extremists and the German political Darwinians admit. War is not, as Bernhardi says, "a fundamental law of development"; nor is it true that "this great verity has been convincingly demonstrated by Charles Darwin.'

Sidney Low.

In the trenches one evening a battalion of the Leinster Regiment held a "kailee" (ceilidh), or Irish sing-song, at which there was a spirited rendering of the humorous old ballad, "Bryan O'Lynn," sung to an infectiously rollicking tune. The opening verse runs: Bryan O'Lynn had no breeches to wear, So he bought a sheep-skin to make him a pair,

With the woolly side out, and the skinny side in,

"Faix, 'tis pleasant and cool," says Bryan O'Lynn.

The swing of the tune took the fancy

of the Germans in their trenches, less than fifty yards away. With a "rumty-tum-tumty-tum-tumty-tum-tum," they loudly hummed the air of the end of each verse, all unknowing that the Leinsters, singing at the top of their voices, gave the words a topical application:

With the woolly side out and the skinny side in,

"Sure, we'll wallop the Gerrys," said Bryan O'Lynn.

*See Dr. Chalmers Mitchell's excellent little volume, Evolution and the War, chap. iv.

Hearty bursts of laughter and cheers arose from both trenches at the conclusion of the song. It seemed as if the combatants gladly availed themselves of this chance opportunity of becoming united again in the common brotherhood of man, even for but a fleeting moment, by the spirit of good humor and hilarity.

A young English officer of a different battalion of the same Leinster Regiment tells of a more curious incident still, which likewise led to a brief cessation of hostilities. Two privates in his company had a quarrel in the trenches, and nothing would do them but to fight it out on No Man's Land. The Germans were most appreciative and accommodating. Not only did they not molest the pugilists, but they cheered them, and actually fired the contents of their rifles in the air by way of a salute. The European War was, in fact, suspended in this particular section of the lines while two Irishmen settled their own little differences by a contest of fists.

"Who will now say that the Germans are not sportsmen?" was the comment of the young English officer. There is, however, another, and perhaps a shrewder view of the episode. It was taken by a sergeant of the company. "Yerra, come down out of that, ye pair of born fools," he called out to the fighters. "If ye had only a glimmer of sense, ye'd see, so ye would, that 'tis playing the Gerrys' game ye are. Sure, there's nothing they'd like better than to see us all knocking blazes out of each other." But as regards the moral pointed by the officer, there must be, of course, many "sportsmen" among the millions of German soldiers; though the opinion widely prevailing in the British Army is that they are often treacherous fighters. Indeed, to their practices is mainly to be ascribed the bitter personal animosity that occasionally marks the relations

between the combatants, when the fighting becomes most bloody and desperate, and-as happens at times in all wars-no quarter is given to those who allow none.

In the wars of old between England and France, both sides were animated by a very fine sense of chivalry. Barère, one of the chief popular orators during the worst excesses of the French Revolution, induced the Convention to declare that no quarter was to be given to the English. "Soldiers of Liberty," he cried, "when victory places Englishmen at your mercy, strike!" But the French troops absolutely refused to act upon the savage decree. The principle upon which both French and English acted during the Peninsular War was that of doing as little harm to one another consistently with the winning of victory. Between the rank-and-file friendly feelings may be said, without any. incongruity, to have existed. They were able, of their own accord, to come to certain understandings that tended to mitigate, to some extent, the hardships and even the dangers to which they were both alike exposed. One was that sentries at the outposts must not be fired on or surprised. Often no more than a space of twenty yards separated them, and when the order to advance was given to either Army, the sentries of the other were warned to retire. Once a French sentry helped a British sentry to replace his knapsack, so that he might more quickly fall back before the firing commenced. A remarkable instance of signaling between the opposing forces is mentioned by General Sir Charles Napier in his "History of the Peninsular War." Wellington sent a detachment of riflemen to drive away some French troops occupying the top of a hill near Bayonne, and, as they approached the enemy, he ordered them to fire. "But," says Napier, "with a