years to come? There is much conspicuously different; a continuous transition indeed from the complete denials of Mr. Yeats to the complete assertions of Mr. Chesterton. But in all may be traced one element; the assertion of a passionate Nationalism definitely maintained against the cosmopolitan ideals of the Victorian period at its beginning, or the Imperial ideals at its close. In the inspiration of that early age all national differences were to smooth themselves out by the advance of knowledge and reasonableness. Common sense, commerce, a universal peace were to work speedily towards the production of a homogeneous civilization, secure in comfort and tranquility and a vague, undogmatic religion. In the preaching of this ideal, undoubtedly some of its advocates came perilously near the abnegation of any special national affection, any particular pride in, or devotion to, their land; and gave a handle to the dreary chatter of a Press which branded them as the friends of every country but their own. Against this Imperialism was a reaction; asserting, indeed, the fundamental devotion of the individual to his own land in England; but crudely denying that right to others; convinced in pathetically sanguine fashion of the Divine mission of England to elevate each separate and subject race to the level of Mayfair or Brixton. So the Irish, the Dutch of South Africa, the natives of India, or of Nyassa ("half devil and half child") were to be "educated" out of their own ways into English ways; placed under the cold justice of the Imperial rule, taught to forget their own language and deny their own religions and ancient pieties, to ascend the steep path of labor and virtue which would eventually turn them into some replica of that finished product of the universe-the Imperial Briton.

Such was the ideal at its best. At

its worst it became a crude assertion of dominance, with a contempt as much for the old England which had not apprehended these Imperial ideals as for the foreigner who still obstinately resisted their sway.

Against both these movements is now being set a Nationalism which, on the one hand, passionately asserts a mystical and entire devotion to its own land; on the other, a respect for the devotion of others-a branding of the murder of a nation as a sin alike against man and God. One catches a note even of laughter in the defiant scorn of the charge of unpatriotism thrown by those who identify their own calamitous methods with the welfare of their country. It is in the name of England, as Englishmen concerned primarily with the honor of their own land, as those to whom the very fields and flowers, and the breath of the particular soil speaks with an unchanging appeal, that these writers fling back the charges of disloyalty made by those who have never been able to understand the elemental meaning of the mystery of Patriotism.

This is common to all. Mr. Yeats is at the heart of that National revival in life and literature which, in the past few years, has made Ireland, on the remote boundaries of Europe, the centre of one of the few living and compelling movements of the age. All his devotion is given to the preservation of this individual spirit, the spirit "at the heart of the Celt in the moments he has grown to love through years of persecution when, cushioning himself about with dreams and hearing fairysongs in the twilight, he ponders on the soul and on the dead."

Mr. Watson in his latest preface laughs openly at "that odious charge of inconstancy to my beloved and worshipped motherland." "To one conscious of these noble origins, conscious, too, of having loved his coun

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 can 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 ap proval 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 present; 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.

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.

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? We 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 1363

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XXVI.

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 contributed 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.

as

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, because 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, 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