and that, therefore, they and their like have a claim on the earnings of the industrious. But for the fact that reasonings such as these are at the bottom of much of the popular socialistic rhetoric of the day we should be ashamed to dwell on such transparent sophistries. "Fantastic puerilities," Mr. Mallock calls them, and yet he feels it to be necessary to expose them and attack them with a vast variety of weapons from his well-stored armory. He shows how fatalistic is the socialistic and Spencerian argument. If the great man Owes his greatness to society, the idle man owes his idleness to the same source, and the stupid man his stupidity, and the dishonest man his dishonesty. The doctrine strikes at the root of all morality. If a man's character and conduct are the results of heredity and environment alone, he cannot be accountable for his actions. He cannot justly be rewarded for his virtues or punished for his crimes. But it is in the field of economics that the battle is now being fought. With copious illustration and with cogent argument, Mr. James and Mr. Mallock show that if the great man who produces an exceptional amount of wealth can, with justice, claim no more than the average man who produces little, because the great man is the product of society past and present, then the idle man may, with equal justice, claim as much wealth as either, for his idleness (and every other form of economic incompetence) is equally the product of society. With equal cogency both these brilliant writers argue against the assertion that most of the achievements of the great man depend on past achievements and discoveries, and that he adds little to what has been already done. This is Mr. Spencer's main contention. The great man Owes his VOL. 1. 21 greatness chiefly to the fact that he inherits the fruits and achievements of civilization. "A Laplace, for instance," he says, "could not have got very far with the 'Mécanique Céleste' unless he had been aided by the slowly developed system of mathematics, which we trace back to its beginnings amongst the ancient Egyptians." Shakespeare could never have written his dramas but for the "multitudinous conditions of civilized life." True to the point of truism! But it is equally true that, but for Shakespeare, the conditions of civilized life, however multitudinous, would never have produced his plays. The question is how to account for Shakespeare and his works. How was it that the Elizabethan age did not produce a hundred Shakespeares? How is it that there are no Shakespeares now, when the conditions of civilized life have become a thousandfold more multitudinous favorable? The fact is, as Mr. Mallock shows, that while all men inherit the past, they inherit it in widely different degrees. and They inherit the knowledge of the past only according to the degree in which they acquire it; the language of the past only according to their skill in manipulating it; the inventions of the past only according to their skill in reproducing and using them. Shakespeare's contemporaries had the same environment and the same national antecedents that he had, but they were not able to do what he did. The introdyction of the past into the question a far-fetched irrelevance and leaves the differences between the great man and others undiminished. If the ordinary man does anything, the exceptional man does more, and he is just as really the cause of the progress that is attributed to him as the ordinary man is of the things and actions that are attributed to him. "Therefore," to let Mr. Mallock close this most imperfect outline of his argument, if the ordinary man does any of the things that he seems to do, and causes any of the events he seems to cause if he ploughs the farm that he seems to plough, and lays the bricks that he seems to lay-indeed, we may add, if he eats the dinners that he seems to eat-the great man in a precisely simiLondon Quarterly Review. lar sense is the cause of those changes that he seems to cause. Hence, of these changes he is, for the practical sociologist, not merely the proximate initiator, whose action and peculiarities may be neglected, but a true and primary cause, on which the attention of the sociologist must be concentrated; and just as in action it is impossible to do without him, so in practical reasoning it is impossible to go behind him. THE STORY OF RAM SINGH.* The night was intensely still. The dawn-wind had not yet come to rustle and whisper in the trees; the crickets had not yet awakened to scream their greeting to the morning sun; the night-birds had gone to their rest, and their fellows of the day had not yet begun to stir on branch or twig. Nature, animate and inanimate alike, was hushed in the deep sleep which comes in this torrid land during the cool hour before the dawn, and the stillness was only emphasized by the sound of furtive, stealthy steps and cautious words whispered softly under the breath. The speakers were a band of some fifty or sixty ruffians; Malays from the Tembeling Valley of Pahang, clothed in ragged, dirty garments; long-haired, rough-looking disreputables from the wilder districts of Trengganu and Kelantan and Besut, across the mountain range; and a dozen truculent, swaggeri Pahang chiefs, rebels against the government, outlaws in their own land, beautifully and curiously armed, clothed in faded silks of many colors, whose splendor had long been dimmed and stained by the dirt and dampness of the dank jungles in which their owners had The facts narrated in this story occurred, exactly as they are here set down, in June, 1894, upon the occasion of the last futile attempt of found a comfortless and insecure hiding-place. A score of small dug-outs were moored to the bank at a spot where the cocoanut trees fringing the water's edge marked an inhabited village. The gang of rebels was broken up into little knots and groups, some in the boats, some on the shore, the men chewing betel-nut, smoking palm-leaf cigarettes, and talking in grumbling whispers. They had had a very long day of it. The mountain range which divides Kelantan from Pahang had been crossed on the previous afternoon; and save for a brief night's rest, the marauders had been afoot ever since. Ever since the dawn broke they had been making their way down the Tembeling River, forcing any natives whom they met to join their party; taking every precaution to prevent word of their coming from reaching the lower country for which they were bound; paying off an old score or two with ready knife and blazing firebrand; and loudly preaching a Sabil Allah (Holy War) against the Infidel in the name of Ungku Saiyid. The latter is the last of the saints of the Peninsula, a man weak and wizened the Pahang rebels to disturb the peace of this state. of body, but powerful and great of reputation, who sends forth others to do doughty deeds for the Faith, while he lives in the utter peace and seclusion of the little shady village of Palah near Kuala Trengganu. Gajah, a huge-boned, big-fisted, coarsefeatured Malay of Sumatran extraction, as the scrubby fringe of sparse, wiry beard encircling his ugly face bore witness. Before the coming of the White Men, this man had been a terror in the land or Pahang. The peasants had been his prey; the highborn chiefs had been forced to bow down before him; the king had leaned upon him as upon a staff of strength; and his will, cruel, wanton, and unscrupulous, had been his only law. The White Men had robbed him of all the things which made life valuable to him, and though he had held up his hand to the last,, doing all in his power to make others run the risks that in the end he might reap the benefit, his fears had proved too strong for him, and he had turned rebel eventually because he could not believe that Englishmen would be likely to act in good faith where he knew that he would, in similar circumstances, have had recourse to treachery. He had suffered acutely in the jungles whither he had fled, for his body was swelled with dropsy and rotten with disease; and who shall say what floods of hatred and longings for revenge surged up in his heart as he sat there in the semidarkness of Che' Bujang's house, and gloated over the prospects of coming slaughter? An hour or two before midnight the raiders reached a spot about threequarters of a mile above the point where the Tembeling River falls into the Pahang, and here a halt was called. The big native house, surrounded by groves of fruit and cocoanut trees, was the property of one Che' Bujang, and no other dwellings were in the immediate vicinity. Che' Bujang was a weak-kneed individual, who never had enough heart to be able to make up his mind whether he was a rebel himself or not; but he claimed kinship with half the chiefs of the raiding party, and he was filled to the throat with a shuddering fear of them all. The principal leaders among the rebels landed when Che' Bujang's kampong was reached, leav'ing the bulk of their followers squatting in the boats and on the water's brink, and made their way up to their relative's house. Che' Bujang received them with stuttering effusion, his words tripping off his frightened tongue and through his chattering teeth in trembling phrases of welcome. The visitors treated him with scant courtesy, pushing him and his people back into the interior of the house. Then they seated themselves gravely and composedly round the big illlighted room, and began to disclose their plans. They were a curious group of people, these raiders, who, with their little knot of followers, had dared to cross the mountain range to batter the face of the great Asiatic god Pax Britannica. The oldest, the most infirm, the most wily, and the least courageous, was the ex-Imaum Prang Indera Gajah Pahang, commonly called To' To' Gajah's three sons, the three who, out of his odd score of children, had remained faithful to their father in his fallen fortunes, were also of the party. They were Mat Kilau, Awang Nong, and Teh Ibrahim, typical young Malay roisterers, truculent, swaggering, boastful, noisy, and gayly-clad. They had no very fine record of bravery to point to in the past, but what they lacked in this respect they made up in lavish vaunts of the great deeds which it was their intention to perform in the future. The foremost fighting chief of the band was the Orang Kaya Pahlawan into him, he was accustomed to boast The last of the Pahang chiefs to enter the house was Mamat Kelubi, a Semantan man who, from being a boatman in the employ of a European mining company, had risen during the disturbances to high rank among the rebels, and now bore the title of Panglima Kiri, which has something of the same meaning as brigadier-general. He was a clean-limbed, active fellow of about thirty years of age, and he stated that he had just returned from Kayangan (fairyland), where he had been spending three months in fasting and prayer, a process which had had the happy result of rendering him invulnerable to blade and bullet. Three weeks, later he was shot and stabbed in many places by a band of loyal Malays, which can only be accounted for by the supposition that the fairy magic had gone wrong in one way or another. To' Gajah spoke when all were seated, and Che' Bujang then learned that an attack was to be made just before dawn upon the small detachment of Sikhs stationed in the big Che' stockade at Kuala Tembeling. At about three o'clock in the morning the chiefs joined their sleepy followers at the boats. The word was passed for absolute silence, and the dug-outs with their loads of armed men were then pushed out into midstream. The stockade, which was to be the object of the attack, was situated upon a piece of rising ground overlooking the junction of the Tembeling and Pahang Rivers, and at its feet was stretched the broad sandbank of Pasir Tambang, which has been the scene of so many thrilling events in the history of this Malayan state. The Tembeling runs almost at right angles to the Pahang, and the current of the former sets strongly towards the sand-bank. The chiefs knew this well, and they therefore ordered their people to allow the boats to drift, feeling sure that without the stroke of the paddle the whole flotilla would run aground of its own accord at Pasir Tambang. of The busy eddies chill wind, which come up before the dawn to wake the sleeping world by whispering in its ear, were beginning to stir gently among the green things with which the banks of the river were clothed. A cicada, scenting the daybreak, set up a discordant whirr; a sleepy bird among the branches piped feebly, and then settled itself again with a rustle of tiny feathers; behind Che' Bujang's kampong a cock crowed shrilly, and far away in the jungle the challenge was answered by one of the wild bantams; the waters of the river, fretting and washing against the banks, murmured complainingly. But the men in the boats, floating down the stream, borne slowly along by the current, were absolutely noiseless. The nerves of one and all were strung to a pitch of intensity. Horny hands clutched weapons in an iron grip; breaths were held, ears strained to catch the slightest sound from the stockade, which, as they drew nearer, was plainly visible on the prominent point, outlined blackly against the dark sky. The river, black also, save where here and there the dim starlight touched it with a leaden gleam, rolled along inexorably, carrying them nearer and nearer to the fight which lay ahead, bearing a sudden and awful death to the dozen Sikhs on the stockade. At last, after a lapse of time that seemed an age to the raiders, the boats grounded one by one upon the sand bank of Pasir Tambang, gently and so silently that they might have been ghostly crafts blown thither from the Land of Shadows. The Orang Kaya Pahlawan landed with Wan Lela, Mat Kilau, Awang Nong, Teh Ibrahim, Panglima Kiri, and a score of picked men at his heels, leaving old To' Gajah and the rest of the party in the boats. Very cautiously they made their way to the foot of the eminence upon which the stockade stood, flitting across the sand in single file as noiselessly as shadows. Then, with the like precautions, they crept up the steep bank until the summit was reached, when the Orang Kaya drew hastily back, and lay flat on his stomach under the cover of some sparse bushes. He and his people had ascended at the extreme corner of the stockade, and he had caught sight of the glint of a riflebarrel as the Sikh passed down his beat away from him. The raiders could hear the regular fall of the heavy ammunition-boots as the sentry marched along. Then they heard him halt, pause for a moment, and presently the sound of his foot-falls began to draw near to them once more. Each man among the raiders held his breath, and listened in an agony of suspense. Would he see them and give the alarm before he could be stricken dead? Would he never reach the near end of his beat? Ah, he was there, within a yard of the Orang Kaya! Why was the blow not struck? Hark, he halted, paused, and looked about him, and still the Orang Kaya held his hand! Had his nerve failed him at this supreme moment? Now the sentry had turned about and was beginning to pace away from them upon his beat. Would the Orang Kaya never strike? Suddenly a figure started up against the sky-line behind the sentry's back, moving quickly, but with such complete absence of noise that it seemed more ghost-like than human. A long, black arm grasping a sword leaped up sharply against the sky; the weapon poised itself for a moment, reeled backwards, and then with a thick swish and a thud descended upon the head of the Sikh. The sentry's knees quivered for a moment: his body shook like a steam-launch brought suddenly to a standstill upon a submerged rock; and then he fell over in a limp heap against the wall of the stockade, with a dull bump and a slight clash of jingling arms and accoutrements. In a second all the raiders were upon their feet, and led by the Orang Kaya waving his reeking blade above his head, they rushed into the now unguarded stockade. Their bare feet pattered across the little bit of open which served the Sikhs for a parade-ground, and then, sounding their war-cry for the first time that night, they plunged into the hut in which the Sikhs were sleeping, eleven survivors, inside the hut. The |