try with the vigilant love that cannot brook a shadow upon her honor, the charge of being against her because he deplores her temporary attitude and action, brings a kind of amazement that has in it something akin to despair."

Mr. Nevinson has devoted his days to appeals for the struggle of martyred nations to maintain their own life; in Ireland, in Macedonia, in South Africa. But all his love centres upon the very soil and scenery of the land of his own home.

The seas gulf and fall around her promontories, or lie brooding there in green and purple lines. Her mountains are low, like blue waves they run along the horizon, and the wind flows over them. It is a country of deep pasture and quiet downs and earthy fields, where the furrows run straight from hedge to hedge. There is moorland too, and lakes with wild names, and every village is full of ancient story. The houses are clustered round old castle walls, and across the breezy distance of fen and common the gray cathedrals rise like ships in full sail.

Mr. Belloc is perhaps the most entirely Nationalist. He is all for the smaller community against the larger. He sings the praise of the South country whose "great hills lie along the sea," and of the men of the South country, against the remoter regions of England. When he drinks the homebrewed ale he drinks (in his own absurd and happy phrase) "Nelson and all the Victories." He will even protest in great language patriotism for a Europe encompassed by alien forces, by a world which cap never understand the traditions and devotions beaten into her very soil by the passion of a thousand years.

She will certainly remain.

Her component peoples have merged and have re-merged. Her particular, famous cities have fallen down. Her

soldiers have believed the world to have lost all, because a battle turned against them. Her best has at times grown poor and her worst rich. Her colonies have seemed dangerous for a moment from the insolence of their power, and then again (for a moment) from the contamination of their decline. She has suffered invasion of every sort; the East has wounded her in arms and corrupted her with ideas; her vigorous blood has healed the wounds at once, and her permanent sanity has turned such corruptions into innocuous follies. She will certainly remain.

And Mr. Chesterton has made himself the very apostle of a new Nationalism which proclaims this variegated development as an essential for the preservation of the sanity of the world. "There is a spirit abroad among the nations of the earth," he cries, "which drives men incessantly on to destroy what they cannot understand, and to capture what they cannot enjoy." This is the spirit which all these men find in the faction which has been dominant in politics and literature; in those enlisting with Mr. Chamberlain under the appeal both to cupidity and Imperial dominance in one last effort to maintain their departing supremacy. And this is the spirit against which the new movement has declared uncompromising war.

If literature be any guide, therefore, one can prophesy certain notes of the spirit of the coming time. First, it will be National; with no appearance of balanced affection and an equal approval and sympathy for all men-a universal benevolence. It will proclaim always a particular concern in the wellbeing of England and the English people; a pride in its ancient history, its ancient traditions, the very language of its gray skies and rocky shore.

Second, it will, I think, dissever itself entirely from those former rallies

of a national spirit which immediately identify a nation with a small and limited class, throwing up boundaries round its privileges against a hungry and raging crowd. There will be none of the follies of the "young England," an attempt to revive a feudalism that has had its great day but now has ceased to be. The assertion will be of a spiritual democracy, with a claim for every Englishman and woman and child to some share in the great inheritance which England has won.

And third, therefore, you will note a bedrock demand in the thrusting forward of the problems of social discontent and social reform, which are destined ultimately to brush aside the futilities of the present party strife. Against those who protest their devotion to their country, but who have done nothing to make that country more desirable for the masses of its millions, and more secure in the devotion of free and satisfied peoples, will be set up a determination at all costs and through all changes to create an England more worthy of the land of our desire. The repatriation of a rural population with the tenacity which only possession of the land can give, the grappling with the problems of our restless cities, the more even spread of the national wealth, the wider distribution of the good things which have flown so plentifully into The Contemporary Review.

our store, the assertion of a minimum standard of life for each citizen of such a land-these are the things which will be heard more and more insistent in the spirit that is arising after the Reaction.

No gleam of such great ideals penetrates at present through the dusty atmosphere of present-day politics. The observer limited to such a dreary outlook might well be exonerated for despair of his country. Government and Parliament are to-day seen mouthing and mumbling over dead things with a kind of pompous futility which would be entirely ridiculous if it were not so tragical.

Such verses as those of Shelley in 1819 seem alone adequate to the pres ent; with their vision of a "Senate" with "Time's worst statute unrepealed"; and religion as "a closed book," and "rulers who neither see nor feel nor know."

But now, as then, there can be hope of the presence also within these graves of that "glorious Phantom" which may "burst to illumine our tempestuous day."

To those who look not at politics only but at the literature which is the earnest of a future change, the darkness of the present is not lacking in the promise of the coming of that brighter dawn.

C. F. G. Masterman.

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THE AWAKENING

The imminent visit of the Afghan Heir-Apparent to India, and the arrangement of a fresh British Mission to Cabul, will revive public interest in a country which occupies such an important position as Afghanistan does with regard to India. These steps are creditable to the vigilance and tact of

OF AFGHANISTAN.

the Indian Foreign Office, but it may be doubted whether its efforts would have been crowned with success if there had not been a responsive movement on the part of the Afghan ruler and his people. Not so very long ago the arrangements now concluded would have been impossible, and in bringing

them about the increase of general knowledge and the prevalence of juster views as to our policy in Afghanistan must be allowed as great a share in the result as skilful diplomacy.

We

Afghanistan itself has not stood still in recent years. Its progress even gives further reason to ask the question: Is the Oriental world after long torpor going to arouse itself and shake off its characteristic lethargy? have seen the awakening of Japan, and this Europe has now been taught is a real awakening. We have had much talk of the awakening of China, but despite the talk China still seems sunk in her ancient slumber. There have been signs that Afghanistan, "the land of rocks and stones and sanguinary feuds," as it used to be called, was about to bestir herself so that she might comply with the inexorable conditions of the modern law of selfpreservation; and now we have evidence that the symptoms were not misleading. Will her awakening be real and lasting, or sham and fleeting? Will it, in short, be marked by some of the energy of Japan, or by the inertia of China? Time alone will tell us; but at least it has begun well with a marked and unexpected demonstration in favor of closer and more cordial relations with the Indian Government. There is no great secret about the fact that throughout the twenty-four years since British troops were last withdrawn from Afghanistan, its relations with the rulers of that country have been an increasing source of anxiety to the Government of India. To the public eye everything between us and the prince who reigned at Cabul was well, but those in authority knew that there was good cause for secret misgiving. When Habibullah succeeded his father Abdurrahman as Ameer, that anxiety increased. It looked as if, to the exclusive and unbending policy of the father, the son was going LIVING AGE. VOL. XXVI. 1363

to add special provocations of his own device. If at any time down to the close of the year 1903 the Foreign Secretary of India could have contrib uted to these pages an article revealing the true situation between his Government and Afghanistan, I venture to say that the dominant notes of his contribution would have been doubt and apprehension.

But

a remarkable and welcome change has occurred during the present year. The Afghan ruler has shown a keen appreciation of certain facts to which he had previously seemed wilfully blind, and his awakening may prove the more lasting, be cause it is attributable to his new appreciation of the necessities of his. own position. The consequences of his changed view may be the breaking down of the barrier of suspicion that has so long separated India and Afghanistan, and the gradual creation of a feeling of confidence in the common interests of the two countries. In an autocratic State it is necessary that the ruler should give the example, and, as it were, set the fashion. The Ameer's policy has hitherto imposed fetters on Afghan development. It is gratifying to know that at the very moment when Lord Curzon is returning to India with the avowed intention of improving our relations with Afghanistan, the ruler of that country, moved by influences with which the action of our official world had nothing to do, has taken the decisive step of sending his son and heir to welcome him on his arrival. That act promises the most gratifying results for the diplomatic conferences which are to be held during the coming winter. Before discussing some of the matters that will then have to be arranged, a brief account of the stages in the Ameer's self-enlightenment will furnish the reader with the material for an opinion as to what has brought

about the highly welcome improvement in Anglo-Afghan relations.

Up to almost the close of last year there was nothing in Habibullah's policy on which to found a hope that he would modify the stern and exclusive policy of his father. He was the fanatical "King of Islam," the upholder of monopolies and prohibitive duties, and the patron of border chiefs and clans who had rightly incurred our displeasure. Like his father, he was never actively hostile, and he kept to the strict letter of his obligations, but his friendship was of the stand-off category, and closed the door to intimacy. The first indication of a coming change was given last December. The Ameer, without preliminary warning, announced in durbar his intention of founding a Chiefs' College, in which the basis of instruction should be the English language, taught by native graduates of India brought from that country. The proposal naturally aroused the greatest opposition on the part of the mollahs, or priests, who so far as they dared upbraided Hubibullah for being false to his religion. The Ameer declared himself unshaken in his plan, but his attention soon after this public statement was called away from reform matters by the perilous personal dispute between himself and his half-brother, Omar Jan, supported by that youth's mother, the Bibi Halima-a title meaning "Queen of the Harem," given to Abdurrahman's principal wife during his lifetime. dispute, which at one moment threatened to have a tragic ending, went on throughout the winter, but it concluded with the Ameer's complete triumph, and the humiliation of Omar Jan and the Bibi Halima. Omar Jan, the favorite youngest son of the late Ameer, is said to have made himself contemptible in the eyes of the Afghan people, and is openly spoken of as "a delicate and conceited fool," while

This

the Bibi Halima herself is a State prisoner in her own palace.

While this family controversy was in progress, and just as events were shaping themselves for the consolidation of the Ameer's position, news came of the outbreak of the war between Japan and Russia. Is there any reason for surprise in this event arousing as much interest in Cabul as in London? The Afghans have a lengthy frontier against Russian territory. There have been many collisions along that frontier which have been ignored by the discriminating directors of our newspapers. There was last winter a large immigration of Russian Turcoman subjects into Afghan territory. The Ameer suddenly found the population of his State thus increased by at least 4,000 persons, and he and his advisers did not know for a time whether they would be allowed to keep them, or if they did, what troubles might not ensue. Then the boundary pillars along the north-west frontier had by natural decay or malice practically all disappeared. These and other circumstances furnished legitimate ground for anxiety at Cabul as to Russia's intentions. For the Afghans Russia's policy was, and must long remain, a dread and menacing reality.

At that moment of apprehension the war broke out in the Far East, and the Government of India is to be congratulated on having done a wise and a bold thing, which has been allowed to pass unnoticed. By agreement with the Ameer it deputed two of its officers, Mr. Dobbs and Major Wanliss, last March to superintend the repairing and replacing of the boundary pillars along the north-west frontier of Afghanistan. This work was successfully accomplished last July, and on their way back to India the two officers named enjoyed a week's hospitality in the palace at Cabul, and received from his own lips the Ameer's repeated thanks

for the good work that they had done. Once more the north-west frontier of Afghanistan is marked out in an unmistakable manner, and no one can violate it without leaving clear evidence of the fact.

The work referred to had barely commenced when news came that the Ameer had met with an accident whilst out shooting. Rumor magnified the occurrence, and in Russia it was generally reported that the Ameer was dead. As a matter of fact, the injury was not very great. His gun had burst, and torn the fingers of the left hand; with proper treatment the wound would have healed in a week or so. The native doctors, however, treated it improperly, and seriously aggravated the injury. The wound did not heal, and the Ameer became alarmingly ill. He was like to lose not merely his hand, but his life. At that critical moment information as to the state of the case reached India, and Lord Curzon at once offered the services of the surgeon on his own staff, Major Bird. The Ameer accepted them. Major Bird proceeded as fast as he could to Cabul, and arrived in time to save Habibullah's life. This signal service sank deep into the Ameer's heart. Major Bird was not the first English surgeon to give proof of his skill in the Afghan capital. Dr. Gray and Miss Hamilton had resided there during the reign of Abdurrahman, but no opportunity of rendering such timely aid to the ruler had presented itself to them. Major Bird's success where the native practitioners had grossly failed confirmed Habibullah's belief in the efficacy of modern science, and he at once decided to establish a hospital on the European model at Cabul. With the assistance of the Indian Government he has engaged an English doctor, a lady doctor, and three trained hospital assistants. They have reached Cabul by this time, and begun there their beneficent work.

As a conclusive proof of his gratitude, the Ameer ordered, last June, the abolition of the cruel penalty of hand-cutting for theft, which has prevailed in Afghanistan for ages, just as it has done among the barbarous chiefs of Central Asia.

It may be questioned whether these occurrences would have produced so deep, and, as there is every reason to believe, so abiding an impression on the Ameer's mind, but for the incidents of the war in the Far East. As soon as that contest became threatening, he ordered the establishment of daily postal runners from the Khyber to Cabul, so that he might receive regular intelligence without delay, and this practice is still in force. It is with no idle inquisitiveness that Habibullah pays thus heavily for the early receipt of news. He reads out the intelligence to his officials and subjects in open durbar, and then he delivers a kind of lecture on the events, and their bearing on the position and security of Afghanistan. The lesson is not the less impressive or attentively listened to because, in reality, it has been inculcated by one Asiatic race upon another, and against a common enemy. The defeats of Russia are encouraging in one sense, because they show that she is not invincible; but from another point of view they do not allay the apprehension of the Ameer, for there is a widely prevalent belief in Central Asia that Russia will seek to recover the laurels she has lost in Manchuria by a move in the direction of India, and Afghanistan lies directly in her path.

The drift of the Ameer's lectures is, according to the reports received of them, full of just appreciation and good sense. The Japanese are winning, he sets forth, because they were well prepared and ready at all points. Their careful prior organization explains their victory. It is not that Russian