gerously to tempt Russian Panslavism, which is not dead but sleeping. In any case it could only mean a reopening of the war on the earliest possible occasion.

preme mastery of parliamentary phraseology, but when carefully examined it is essentially cryptic. It makes no definite statement and perhaps it would hardly have been safe to do so. But it may be seriously doubted whether either he or Mr. Austen Chamberlain, who so bravely backed up the Government in this matter, had the faintest idea of what really was to be done to clear up the imbroglio. By the way, authoritative French opinion is obviously pro-Turk for the good reason that immense sums of French money are invested in Turkey. Still, however grotesque the injustice, Europe will hardly allow Turkey to defy her to the extent of retaining Adrianople. Probably Turkey knows this and is only seeking a rectification of the boundary-line in Thrace. This is the view of leading organs of opinion in Germany and France alike. To leave the Turks in Adrianople would be danThe Saturday Review.

The Turks then may hope to get something out of the muddle, like the quondam Allies, at the expense of Bulgaria. Considering the pure cynicism which prompts the action of all parties, the best we can hope is that an acute sense of self-interest may lead them to make as permanent a settlement as possible. But, when the matter is viewed in the dry light of truth and common sense, it is certain that the Balkan States owe nothing to the Powers who have confessedly studied nothing but their own interests throughout. England has had no axe to grind and is therefore less distrusted than any of the others. But she is not able to indicate a policy, still less to carry it through.

"It's my birthday to-morrow," said Mrs. Jeremy, as she turned the pages of her engagement book.

"Bless us, so it is," said Jeremy. "You're thirty-nine or twenty-seven or something. I must go and examine the wine-cellar. I believe there's one bottle left in the Apollinaris bin. It's the only stuff in the house that fizzes." "Jeremy! I'm only twenty-six." "You don't look it, darling; I mean you do look it, dear. What I meanwell, never mind that. Let's talk about birthday presents. Think of something absolutely tremendous for me to give you."

"A rope of pearls."

"I didn't mean that sort of tremendousness," said Jeremy quickly. "Anyone could give you a rope of pearls; it's simply a question of overdrawing

devotion of yours by doing something for me."

"Anything," said Jeremy grandly. "Shall I swim the Channel? I was practising my new trudgeon stroke in the bath this morning." He got up from his chair and prepared to give an exhibition of it.

"No, nothing like that." Mrs. Jeremy hesitated, looked anxiously at him and then went boldly at it. "I want you to go in for that physical culture that everyone's talking about."

"Who's everyone? Cook hasn't said a word to me on the subject; neither has Baby; neither has-"

"Mrs. Hodgkin was talking to me about it yesterday. She was saying how thin you were looking."

"The scandal that goes on in these villages," sighed Jeremy. "And the Vicar's wife too. Dear, all this is weeks and weeks old; I suppose it has only just reached the Vicarage. Do let us be up-to-date. Physical culture has been quite démodé since last Thursday."

"Well, I never saw anything in the paper"

"Knowing what wives are I hid it from you. Let us now, my dear wife, talk of something else."

"Jeremy! Not for my birthday present?" said his wife in a reproachful voice. "The Vicar does them every morning," she added casually.

"Poor beggar! But it's what Vicars are for." Jeremy chuckled to himself. "I should love to see him," he said. "I suppose it's private, though. Perhaps if I said 'Press'

"You are thin, you know."

"My dear, the proper way to get fat is not to take violent exercise, but to lie in a hammock all day and drink milk. Besides, do you want a fat husband? Does Baby want a fat father? You wouldn't like, at your next garden party, to have everybody asking you in a whisper, 'Who is the enormously

stout gentleman?' If Nature made me thin-or, to be more accurate, slender and of a pleasing litheness-let us believe that she knew best."

"It isn't only thinness; these exercises keep you young and well and active in mind."

"Like the Vicar?"

"He's only just begun," said his wife hastily.

"Let's wait a bit and watch him," suggested Jeremy. "If his sermons really get better, then I'll think about it seriously. I make you a present of his baldness; I shan't ask for any improvement there."

Mrs. Jeremy went over to her husband and patted the top of his head. "In a very devoted mood this morning,'" she quoted.

Jeremy looked unhappy.

"What pains me most about this," he said, "is the revelation of your shortcomings as a wife. You ought to think me the picture of manly beauty. Baby does. She thinks that, next to the postman, I am one of the"So you are, dear."

"Well, why not leave it Really, I can't waste my time fattening refined gold and stoutening the lily. I am a busy man. I walk up and down the pergola, I keep a dog, I paint little water-colors, I am treasurer of the cricket club; my life is full of activities."

"This only takes a quarter of an hour before your bath, Jeremy."

"I am shaving then; I should cut myself and get all the soap in my eyes. It would be most dangerous. When you were a widow, and Baby and the pony were orphans, you and Mrs. Hodgkin would be sorry. But it would be too late. The Vicar, tearing himself away from Position 5 to conduct the funeral service

"Jeremy, don't!"

"Ah, woman, now I move you. You are beginning to see what you were in

danger of doing. Death I laugh at; but a fat death-the death of a stout man who has swallowed the shavingbrush through taking too deep a breath before beginning Exercise 3, that is more than I can bear."

"Jeremy!"

"When I said I wanted to kill someone for you, I didn't think you would suggest myself, least of all that you wanted me fattened up like a Christmas turkey first. To go down to posterity as the large-bodied gentleman who inhaled the badger's hair; to be billed in the London press in the words, 'Curious Fatal Accident to Adipose Treasurer' to do this simply by way of celebrating your twenty-sixth

Punch.

birthday, when we actually have a bottle of Apollinaris left in the Apollonaris bin-darling, you cannot have been thinking."

His wife patted his head again gently. "Oh, Jeremy, you hopeless person," she sighed. "Give me a new sunshade. I want one badly."

"No," said Jeremy, "Baby shall give you that. For myself I am still feeling that I should like to kill somebody for you. Lloyd George? No. F. E. Smith? N-no. . . ." He rubbed his head thoughtfully. "Who invented those exercises?" he asked suddenly. "A German, I think." "Then," said Jeremy, buttoning up his coat, "I shall go and kill him.”

A. A. M.

It seems to be the clear intention of the leaders of the Conservative Party to treat the whole period of Progressive Government as a kind of dies non, to be blotted out of the calendar, and to revert to the situation before the Parliament Act, and before the Bills for establishing Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment, and for neutralizing the excessive power of the property vote. Payment of members is also to cease, and the old premium on wealth to be restored. The method of this revolutionary change is a Liberal defeat at the polls. If possible, this is to take place before these Bills have been carried. They will then all disappear, and the Parliament Act with them. If such an election should only arrive in 1915, the same results will follow, but the procedure will, of course, be still more subversive. The House of Lords will be restored to its plenary powers. Home Rule will be annulled, and the Welsh Church placed in full possession of the tithe and the rest of its funds, and, we suppose, re

stored to its old association with the State. Invited to cut its own throat, to save the Tory Party the trouble of cutting it, the Government, at the demand of the House of Lords, is to submit its leading Bills either to a Referendum or to a General Election. If the Ministry survives this ordeal and commands the situation through the Parliament Act, it is again to submit its fortunes to the arbitrament of the peers.

It does not seem quite clear what is then to happen to the Welsh Bill. Lord Lansdowne tells us that the Opposition are men of honor, and that when they say that they will accept the verdict of the people, they mean it. But in the next breath he tells us that there can be no compromise on Welsh Disestablishment. As to Home Rule, all that the Lords could offer would be a loyal endeavor to stop the Ulster threat of violence offered to the Crown. This, if you please, is to be yielded in exchange for a fresh commitment to a free inquest of the peers of all but

the bare principle of devolution. Meanwhile, Ulster declines to regard even this demi-tender of Lord Lansdowne as binding upon her. Twenty General Elections, she declares, will not abate her resistance. Even the Lords seem struck with the absurdity of the process under which they pass amendment after amendment declining to consider Liberal Bills until they have been submitted to the people. You cannot have two General Elections at once, says the super-insolent Lord Salisbury. "Very well, drop one of your Bills-whichever you please." "Or submit both to a Referendum," suggests Lord Lansdowne. The offer is a measure of the unthinking egoism of the peers. No serious Constitutionalist imagines that a Referendum can be set up as a standing barrier to all Liberal Bills and taken down, like hurdles after a steeplechase, when the Tory flat-racing season begins, or that it can be established as an addition to the existing power of the Lords.

Let us, then, say at once that this is the speech and the policy of revolution, a Revolution of the Whites, which is so much more dangerous than a Revolution of the Reds. Its fruits must be rebellion over three and a half Irish provinces, a tithe and church war in Wales, and a resolve on the part of Liberalism and Labor not to leave standing one stick or stone of the remaining functions of the House of Lords. It is enough to add that the body which arrogates these powers of disturbance has deprived itself of all moral right to exercise them. Lord Lansdowne has given up the House of Lords. He has offered to turn it into an Electoral College, and from that source and from other sources to constitute something that the people might be brought to accept as a fair kind of Second Chamber. But we are bound to add that these manoeuvres tend to harden the natural indisposi

tion of Liberals to surrender constitu

tional power to any body strong enough to stand up to the House of Commons. We have got the old House of Lords' spirit up against progress. Well, we have beaten it once, and we shall beat it again. But supposing we let the chained dog loose again, free for another bite? We are told that the Government's policy is that in no case shall the Parliament Act be repealed or the absolute veto restored. But let us consider one or two possibilities. We imagine that, under the coming measure for the reform of the House of Lords, we may resort to the expedient of the Joint Session. It is improbable that the Government will contemplate a House of less than 150 members. If this body is predominantly Conservative, it offers a strong counter-weight to all but a great Liberal majority, indeed to any majority which can be called normal. The social prestige of the aristocracy, headed by the most popular and powerful spokesmen of the territorial interest, might secure such a House. The very process of election would confirm its leaders in a policy of uncompromising resistance to a progressive House of Commons, which could then claim no superior parentage. Are we then to avoid election, and fly to the devices of nomination and indirect election? There are obvious objections. If we

are to aim at a Liberal House of Lords when the Liberals are in power, and a Tory House when the Tories are in power, the whole argument for a revising Chamber loses its force. If, again, we deliberately build up a powerful Chamber of Notables, through the mixed agency of the Crown, the Executive and the Houses of Parliament, we shall endow the conservative elements of the nation with an authority they ought not to exercise. Perhaps the best plan would be simply to take the House as it stands and cut down its

voting power to about one hundred members.

But the main objection to all these proposals for "reforming" the House of Lords is that the real problem is that which "A Liberal M.P." raises in his remarkable pamphlet, namely, "the question of the House of Commons." How is the House of Commons to go on after Home Rule? Are we to consider that measure to be a complete satisfaction of the demand for selfgovernment and for efficient government, or as a first step in a general process of devolution? The Prime Minister has clearly shown his preference for the latter issue, and it is fair, therefore, to say that he agrees in the main with Sir Edward Grey's dramatic conclusion that "without devolution we shall have destruction." How, then, if events are moving towards Scottish Home Rule, Welsh Home Rule, and last, but not least, English Home Rule, can we proceed to reconstitute the House of Lords before we know what subjects will be left for either House to consider? If, for example, the vexed questions of land, education, and religious endowment, are referred to national assemblies for settlement, the quarrel between the two Houses assumes a new and a much reduced aspect. On the other hand, if we reject devolution, and resort to a drastic amendment of the procedure of the House of Commons, the historic conflict between the two Houses may be resumed.

The heart, therefore, of the problem lies in the future constitution of the House of Commons. Liberals cannot be asked to reconstruct, and quite possibly to revivify, the non-representative assembly in the hour when it is

The Nation.

No

the future of representative government which is really at stake. cure for the evils of our Parliamentary system-the congestion of business, the enfeeblement of the private member, the too excessive influence of the Executive, and its increasing divorce from the work of the Commons-is to be found in any scheme for the reconstitution of the House of Lords. When we have decided what sort of a House of Commons we want, we shall know what place in this revised scheme a Second Chamber should occupy, who should appoint it, what should be its numbers, and with what powers we wish to endow it.

If it is urged that all the great changes consequent on Irish Home Rule are incapable of solution on party lines, we assent. But we hope that the Government will pause, at this moment of all others, before they give the full seal of their authority and the full force of the official machinery to a solution of the question of the House of Lords calculated to weaken the force of the Parliament Act. There is much talk of mandates. But no one disputes that the Government possessed as unequivocal an electoral order for that measure as any British Ministry ever received. No such public opinion exists in regard to the reform of the House of Lords. The people have never been canvassed on it. If they have any general view— and nothing but a general view prevails-it is that the House should be smaller, and less obstructive, and more rational, and more modern than it is, but that its teeth have been drawn, and that a Liberal Government is in no way called upon to present it with a brand-new set.