paid and, by consequence, too badly fed to be efficient either as fighters or as workers. That is Nature's way, we are bidden to reflect; she is simply killing off the weaklings, and when they are all extinguished those that remain will be the better and stronger types, Thus does she eventually settle all social problems. But, unfortunately, we cannot wait for her, and we cannot afford to pay her price. In the long run our Diana of the Ephesians, our goddess of the rack and knife, may settle everything, including the solar system. But she is very, very slow, and terribly wasteful. She takes a few million years to modify a species, a few thousand to get a noxious custom dropped, and she bathes the process in seas of blood. The Protective State will do the work faster and more mercifully. It will interfere with the course of nature when the course of nature is mischievous. It will not "defy" natural laws, but it will employ them for the general benefit. It will understand that the struggle for life or the struggle for power, with all its attendant train of poverty and suffering, is one method of promoting progress. And recognizing that it will turn aside and set about to soften the conflict and produce the desired result by other methods less ruinous and more effectual. Its respect for individual liberty will be qualified by a higher regard for the well-being of all the individuals who in the aggregate make up the community of the present and the future. It may even go so far as to say that nobody shall be very rich and nobody very poor, since both these extremes are socially undesirable; and that nobody shall be either underworked or grossly overworked. It will be part of the Greater Protection to make the country an "environment" very unfavorable to the development either of millionaires or of paupers, of idlers or of slaves.

But this, exclaims the convinced In

dividualist in horror, this is Collectivism, this is Socialism, this is to misunderstand the functions of government. "Philanthropy," says Mr. IwanMüller, "is not a department of State"; statesmen have no right to use public money in order to redress the "so-called inequalities" of nature. That is the old Benthamite conception of passivity and non-intervention which in Germany is called Manchestertum. It is the doctrine of the Utilitarian Radicals, with their belief in laissez-faire, and freedom of contact, and in the inevitable and supremely beneficent operation of "enlightened selfishness." To them society was a prize-ring, with the State looking tranquilly on, while the combatants pummelled each other inside the ropes; public authority, the collective conscience, was not entitled to interfere with the manly game, though it might perhaps be permitted to sponge the fallen. Such is the negative view of State action, which has been steadily growing out of favor for more than half a century, while the opposite theory, which regards the State as a positive instrument for improving the condition of its subjects, has been gaining ground. It is strange to find it brought forward in the interests of the Conservative party. Mr Iwan-Müller's Darwinian disquisition concludes with an attack on Mr. Lloyd George's Finance Bill. But Conservatives may oppose the Budget without being committed to an archaic Individualism. The Liberal scheme had better be dealt with on its merits and its demerits; the Darwinian battery need not be brought into action to breach its defences. At any rate, its range of fire should be restricted; it certainly

"Nobody," says Mr. Iwan-Muller, "denies that it is the duty of the State to make provision for life's actual failures." This does not seem quite consistent, for, after all, "life's actual failures " are only those extremely unfit persons who are being subjected to the very natural evolutionary process of being eliminated by the " struggle" from which all blessings flow.

should not be permitted to sweep away the entire policy of Protective State action. There could be no greater disaster for the Unionist party than that it should be identified with the policy which caused Radical manufacturers to repeal the Corn Laws and oppose the Factory Acts. One can understand that certain sturdy, old-fashioned Liberals, who have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since the middle of the last century, might hanker after this ancient faith. But modern Conservatism, which traces its descent through Mr. Chamberlain and Randolph Churchill to Disraeli, and then back to Canning and Pitt and Chatham and ultimately to Bolingbroke-what has Conservatism to do with this faded Idol of the Market Place? Little indeed, one would imagine, at a time when the party has officially adopted the policy of economic protection. Tariff Reform can only be defended as an item in the programme of national conservation, national concentration, national subordination of individual interests to the common welfare. It is the expression of State action in the economic sphere; the Greater Protection towards which all parties are unconsciously moving is the extension of that principle to all other social relations. Free Trade, on the other hand, is one side of Free Contract and Free Competition, for these things go together. The Cobdenite is logical when he is an uncompromising Individualist; but the Unionist Tariff Reformer who invests himself with this raiment at second hand is very oddly suited; and when he tells us that it is a "Socialism" to interfere with the operation of competition, Socialism to endeavor to redress the inequalities of tradition and acquired advantage, Socialism to seek to make the life-struggle less arduous for the masses of men, he runs great risk of receiving for reply:-"So much the better then for Socialism, and so

much the worse for Conservatism."

But the Greater Protection is not Socialism, except in the large general sense that it opposes an extravagant Individualism. I should prefer Mr. Lester Ward's excellent term Sociocracy, which is defined as the scientific control of the social forces by the collective mind of society for its advantage. Sociocracy, while recognizing natural inequalities; would aim at the abolition or the levelling-down of artificial inequalities; it would confer benefits in strict proportion to merit, but it would insist on equality of opportunity as the means of determining the degree of merit. It would make the State an organism, not a collection of individuals each free to seek his own advantage and advancement subject to certain legal and conventional restraints. Towards this objective all parties, whether they know it or not. are tending; it is so obviously the coming stage in social evolution. For Conservatives to accept the counsel of those who set themselves against this "stream of tendency," and anchor themselves by the weed-grown landmarks of Individualism and Unchecked Competition, would be suicidal. The Utilitarian theory was the outcome of special and temporary conditions; its essentially mechanical and non-moral theory of government was a phase of thought due in the main to historical and economic accidents, not likely to recur. The older doctrine, that of the Ethical State, was launched into the main stream of ideas more than twenty centuries ago, and its flag has never disappeared from the waters, though now and then passed and shadowed by some newer ensign. Conservatives, one would imagine, in spite of Lord Cromer and other converts from the Liberalism of the mid-Victorian era, have small inducement to accept the authority of James Mill and Bentham, and cut themselves loose from that

long chain of testimony which begins with Plato and does not end with Hegel. If they need a concise definition of the function of the community in its political expression, they can turn to that brief emphatic maxim, set on guard, as it were, at the threshold of the first great scientific temple builded to the Art of Government. "As The Fortnightly Review.

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the State," said Aristotle, "was formed to make life possible, so it exists to make life good." Not the Cult of the Unfit, nor the Extinction of the Unfit, but the increase of Fitness by the improvement of the environment, is the Sociocratic ideal, the goal at which the Greater Protection is aiming.

Sidney Low.

The recent events in Spain must seem inexplicable to those who have not got the key to them.

All of a sudden, as it appeared, the nation was shaken, as by an earthquake, from north to south, from east to west, with not a single premonitory sign that anything was wrong.

A war of intervention neither more just or more unjust than that of France and Casa Blanca, or England and Egypt or the Transvaal, suddenly seemed to throw the nation into an agony of rage.

What

To us, who make our little wars without a protest from our servile population, for not a nation in all Europe is so servile and so listless as our own in everything outside our islands, it must have seemed nothing but madness or at least idiocy. can possibly be simpler or less reprehensible than for a European Power to coerce an inferior race who objects to let it work a mine upon its territory? Mines, we all know, are placed by a wise Power in many countries where people are black, yellow or brown, and in general use inferior arms. That shows, to any one who cares to read God's mind, that He intended all those mines for us. Why, if He did so, He did not put them in our territory we never stop to think— or if we think, we fancy we are helping Him in His design. We know that

He is overdone with work and looks to us to aid Him and fill up all lacunæ in the creative plan. Besides all this, when natives "massacre" some of the workmen who by working at the mines are helping God and us, what more is wanted? It clearly shows that we must be up and at the outrageous authors of the massacres for our good name and God's.

Spaniards, of course, are hardly Europeans, but then their "mission" evidently was divine, by virtue of their arms. Who doubts that it is impious, and a direct and wicked violation of the eternal fitness of things, that peoples who are half armed should feel a delicacy about frontiers, treaty rights and all those things that it is patent were never designed for them, as is typified by their inferior guns?

Let this be as it may, the Spanish people did not see their way to fight merely to uphold the rights of the authors of the scheme I propose to expose.

Since the Middle Ages, Spain has had a series of penal settlements on the north coast of Africa. Ceuta, just opposite Gibraltar, is the only one of any value to her and that purely from a strategic point of view. The others, Alhucemas, El Peñon de la Gomera, Melilla, and Las Islas Chafarinas are sinks of money to the Spanish Crown. 4 Aristotle, Politics 1 § 2.

Most of them are situated between the sea and the Riff Mountains.

El Peñon de la Gomera is a mere barren rock, rising up from the sea, a miniature Gibraltar, connected by a bridge with the mainland. The coun

try opposite to it is rocky and extremely mountainous; the tribe who holds it being one of the fiercest of the Riffs. For centuries no Spanish soldier has been safe a mile beyond its guns.

Les Alhucemas (the rosemary bushes) is a shallow sandy bay, without a proper anchorage, and the same geographical conditions apply to it as apply to El Peñon. Las Chafarinas are several flat, wind-swept, and sunscorched islets. They contain no proper wells, and rain is collected in a catch-tank and in dry seasons water is brought from Malaga. They have not long been Spanish and now serve as a place to which to send political prisoners. Maceio, the Cuban leader, passed several years in this inhospitable spot. In those days, report averred, the Government detained him there, hoping that he would die, as the climate of the islands is not good and every sort of sanitation was unknown. However, he survived and found his death by the hand of treachery in his own native land.

Melilla is the nearest of Spain's possessions on the coast to the French frontier in Algeria. It is a little, oldfashioned Spanish town, full of strange passages and archways, over some of which the double-headed Austrian eagle still rears its lying head.

Upon the east of the old town, which clusters round a hill, is a more modern suburb in which there are some shops and to which Moors from the interior resort to deal in wool and grain. If ever a railway is constructed Melilla might be valuable as it is nearer to Fez than any other town upon the coast. At present it is worth

less, for it affords no anchorage at all, and has an open roadstead exposed to every wind. Outside the town the country appears sterile, although ten or twelve miles away it is said to become richer and to grow good crops of wheat. The Spanish territory extends not much more than a mile or at the most a mile and a half outside the town and the tribe (Khalaiya) which inhabits it is warlike and hostile to the last degree. Of late there has sprung up a little trade owing to the fact that half the hinterland has been held for the last five years by the adherents of El Roghi, who is in arms against the Moorish Emperor.

In direct contravention of the Act of Algeciras the Spaniards at Melilla have given protection underhand to this guerilla chief.

A trade sprang up chiefly in arms and cartridges, which were supplied from Malaga, from Cartagena, Almeria and from Melilla, the procession of smuggling craft being described in a certain paper as perpetual.

All this was bad enough, and was undoing underhand all that the Act of Algeciras had in view as to the policing of North Africa. El Roghi, a paltry man enough, could not have lasted all these years if Spain had done her duty and barred him from the sea. Instead of doing this, he has had perpetual stores of arms and provisions flowing in to him from Spain and from Algeria, and I do not hesitate to say that every officer, beginning with the governor, has had a finger in the pie. Bad as

All this was bad enough.

an example of the bad faith of Europeans to the Moors and bad for Spain herself.

It was bad enough after having signed the Act of Algeciras, which engages to protect the Sultan of Morocco by every means, and to assist him to police his realm, but worse remains behind. It should be said that for a

time France was at least as much to blame as Spain in regard to giving help to El Roghi; but since the Act of Algeciras has been signed she has acted differently, that is, about the Ris.

To explain what then took place and how the intervention came about requires a word or two.

In common with most other countries in the Middle Ages, Spain seems to have coveted the coast of Africa; that is, she thought that Africa was rich because the riches of the East reached her through Africa.

When Isabella the Catholic died, she left a sentence in her will calling on Spaniards never to forget that "Spain's future is in Africa." Why she wrote this no man can tell, unless perhaps it was because there was a party at her Court which had opposed Columbus, for one reason; or perhaps because she thought to stir Spain up to a crusade against the Moors and held out Africa as a reward to pious Catholics.

From that time to the present day there has been a party at Madrid which has never ceased to ring the changes on this will. "The will of the Great Queen" is trotted out perpetually and never fails to bring a cheer. This is the more astounding when one reflects how narrow is the strait that separates North Africa from Spain. One would have thought that every opportunity was ready to their hands for Spaniards to know the poverty of Africa and to perceive that most of it was thickly populated. It was not so, and a most dense and perfect ignorance has prevailed in Spain of everything across the straits. One of the legends that has stamped itself into the popular imagination is that the Riff is full of minerals. That, too, without regard to the fact that in Algeria there are almost none, and that the geological formation of the two countries is most similar. But,

be that as it may, some one discovered, or alleged that he discovered, some lead and iron deposits near Melilla. Opinions vary as to the richness of these mines. Some say that they are rich, and others that there is little there at all. Others say all the companies were working for was war, to get compensation from Morocco if outrages occurred, or else get it from Spain, if they could bring about an intervention on her part.

In Spain there is no great capitalistic class, such as there is in England or in France. The great capitalists scarcely reach fifty, and thus the selfsame names appear in every scheme and all the jobs which have been so disastrous to Spain during the past few years. And of these names three or four have been seen just like recurring decimals and now appear in the extremely curious history of the Melilla mines.

These names, that of the Count of Romanones, ex-Liberal Minister, and of his brother, the Duke of Tovar (a personal friend and hanger-on of the young king), the Marquis of Comillas, chief shareholder of the Spanish Transatlantic Line, that of Garcia Alex, and, finally, that of the Count of Guëll, have been mixed up with schemes that have been ruinous to Spain.

They launched the unlucky Rio de Oro scheme. They figure in the great monopoly of tobacco which makes all Spain smoke dear and bad cigars. The subsidy to the decaying Transatlantic Line, which has not had a new boat for the past fifteen years, was engineered by them. Finally, they have been mixed up with all the operations of the Bank of Spain, that great octopus which has its tentacles upon the heart of the nation. I do not say that all or any of these men are knowingly dishonest any more than were the members of the Rhodesian gang. What I do say is that, after the