some majority. Of the Coalition candidates, 58 'ProTreaty,' as against 36 Anti-Treaty,' have seats. Labour has 17 members, there are 7 farmers' representatives, while six label themselves 'Independent.' The four members for Dublin University are loyalists, but will support the Treaty, faute de mieux. The new factor is the presence of Labour members. A dangerous and

anarchic manifesto was issued in their name before the elections, calling upon the people to pay no rent, and demanding the nationalisation of the railways. On the other hand, the Labour men are against militarism and disavow the tyrannical methods of the Irish Republican Army. They will probably support the Treaty'; but their support may be bought too dearly, if the Government condone the anarchic outrages that are being committed in the South of Ireland, avowedly in the interests of Labour.

It thus appears that the future is still (June 24) dark and obscure. First, it is not certain that the Republican party in Ireland will accept the Constitution as now formulated, and so it is not certain that it will pass the Irish Parliament, although a large majority of 'ProTreaty' members have been returned. If it is accepted by that Parliament, will the 'mutineers' of the Army acquiesce? If they do not acquiesce, are Mr Griffith and Mr Collins strong enough to prevent them from creating disorder? Is Mr Collins willing, in the interests of the Constitution and of peace, to employ force against his former associates? We do not know the answer to these questions, as we do not know whether Mr Griffith and Mr Collins propose to accept the Constitution as final (for their time at least), or whether they regard the establishment of the Irish Free State as only a stage on the way to an Irish Republic. Mr Collins has hinted more than once that he has only accepted the former because he could not get the latter; but whether he is prepared to fight to maintain the former in opposition to the fanatical idealists who demand the latter remains to be seen. It is, perhaps, significant that the motto at the head of every copy of 'The Free State,' which supports the Treaty, is a sentence of Mr Griffith to the effect that this is no more a final settlement, than this is the final generation.' There is

no finality in human affairs, and the sentence may be quite innocuous. But we fear that it suggests, in its context, that those who accept the Treaty and the Constitution founded upon it need not, therefore, abandon the struggle for a Republic. And if this interpretation prevail, we may look for many weary years of disturbance before Ireland sets herself to put in order her domestic affairs.

The moment of destiny is now. If the Irish leaders can bring themselves to the point of enforcing law and order, no matter who are the guilty parties that have to be punished, and of treating rebellion against the Irish Free State as treason, they will have the great mass of their countrymen behind them. But if they falter, or hesitate, in this primary business of government, they will not only forfeit their position and their authority, but they will betray the country which they profess to serve. No excuse will avail any longer-neither Ulster intolerance nor British intervention. What have these things to do with the Irish Free State? Ireland is not free now; but that is because of the menace of armed assassins and incendiaries. It cannot be free until the authorities of the State remove this menace. It cannot be prosperous until credit is restored and the Irish people are required to pay their debts, including their arrears of rent. Great Britain may be trusted to carry to completion the Land Purchase Acts, if the Irish Government heartily and impartially co-operates. And Ireland cannot take her proper place in the comity of nations until she learns to distinguish between the things that are only of sentimental and those that are of vital concern. It matters very little whether she paints her letter-boxes green or red; it matters very little whether she pretends that Irish is the vernacular of the country or not; but it matters very greatly that she shall lay the foundations of her new state upon justice and industry and honour. Irish political leaders no longer pay much attention to the moral admonitions of the Church to which most of them belong; but they are now appealing to a wider Court. It is by their actions and not by their words that they will be judged in future by the civilised world, and from that judgment there is no appeal. Securus judicat orbis terrarum.

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW

No. 473.-OCTOBER, 1922.

Art. 1. SIR GEORGE PROTHERO, K.B.E., LITT.D. THE death of Sir George Prothero, which occurred on July 10, has been a great personal loss to many readers of this 'Review' and will have seemed a great public loss to many more; and it would be unseemly, or worse, if this present number of the 'Quarterly' did not contain some slight memorial of one of whom many beautiful things have been said. The world is, indeed, quite clearly the richer in that he has lived, quite evidently the poorer for having lost him. No man, doubtless, is irreplaceable, yet he was one whose place will be hard to fill; no human character is faultless, yet his was one lovable and distinguished beyond the ordinary. In a day of reckless and extravagant tributes one can write of him without fearing to strain language or to suppress truth.

George Walter Prothero was born in 1848, the eldest son of a clergyman who in due course became Rector of Whippingham and Canon of Westminster. Good scholarship was the aim of his life; and he was a good scholar, as one might say, from the beginning. At Eton, where he was on the Foundation, he became head of the school; at King's he was first a scholar and then a fellow of the College. His academic effort-he was sixth classic-did not prevent him from being more than once captain of his college boat; and till his last years his mental activity was balanced by his pleasure in walking and fishing, and at one time in mountaineering. His adult life might be said to have fallen into three unequal sections-the Cambridge, the Edinburgh, and the London periods, lasting respectively from 1876 to 1894, Vol. 238.-No. 473.

from 1894 to 1899, and from 1899 to the end. Or one might take 1899 as the decisive year, since it was at that date that he passed from the academic life of the Universities to the larger life of London and the control of this 'Review.' At Cambridge (from 1884) he held the post of University Lecturer in History, and at Edinburgh he was the first to fill the new Modern History Chair. He was a good lecturer, but not a great one; and his work in this sphere was rather to be called competent than brilliant. He taught his pupils much, but he had not that je ne sais quoi in the conférencier which sets the imagination aflame and causes ideas to scorch and burn, But his pupils loved him; and he loved them in return, especially the poor Scottish lads in Edinburgh, who would sacrifice a meal for a book and whose enthusiasm for learning made his time in that centre of study perhaps the happiest of his life. His real bent, however, as was shown increasingly, lay in the direction of editorial work; and it is not to his Life of Simon de Montfort, or even to that of his personal friend, Henry Bradshaw, the librarian, so much as to his admirable selection of Statutes and Documents of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James, and to the large collaborative enterprises of the Cambridge Modern History and the Cambridge University Series, that his friends will turn for the memorial of his fame. These latter works especially have advanced the study of history along what might be called scientific, as distinct from literary lines; and the mark of the Cambridge School of History is upon them. Of that school he had become, in conjunction with his great friend Sir Adolphus Ward and his pupil Mr G. P. Gooch, a foremost representative.

History, as his memoir of Sir John Seeley had reminded the public, is but past politics and politics only history in the making. The editorship of the 'Quarterly Review,' which, as we have seen, was offered him in 1899, gave him the position where, perhaps of all others, the knowledge of that fact-an outsider may surely say it even in these columns without mauvaise honte-is best able to be appreciated. It became his business thenceforward, whilst studying to recall continually to the thoughts of a cultivated circle of readers the lessons and glories of the past, to show them also the rational

foundations of new things-the meaning and necessity and proper limitation of that sort of change which averts revolution by forestalling it. His judicial, sympathetic, generous mind was admirably fitted for this kind of work; and he preserved in the 'Review' a fine historic sense and a high standard of political culture. But the times were difficult, transitional and increasingly opportunist; and the introduction of signed articles, which was a sign of the times and the main innovation during his editorship, doubtless rather impaired the old sense of direction. He himself was, I think, feeling his way, like every one else, into democracy; for he was too wise a man not to grasp, consciously or unconsciously, the force of that fact which Lord Morley has crystallised in the saying that democracy is rather a form of civilisation than a form of government. All who had dealings with him in his editorial capacity were sensible, I feel sure, that they were in contact with a man of perfect integrity and disinterestedness, a man who loved justice and venerated truth, and to whom all the tricks and fashions and intellectual dishonesties of tendencious journalism were exceedingly repulsive. He rated his own trade high and he prized its honour in proportion. I remember his writing to me something to the effect that in the state of society in which we lived an upright journalist was of more consequence than an upright Member of Parliament; and I think it was never more true of any man than of him that his armour was his honest thought, and simple truth his utmost skill.'

Sir George's great editorial gifts were turned to new account when, as the War proceeded, he was appointed to a post in the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, and subsequently to be Director of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office. I was with him all that time. He was, to my mind, an almost perfect head of a department. His tact, his sympathy, his courtesy, his calm, his enjoyment of little jokes and his encouragement of good ones, alleviated in a wonderful degree the last, long stretches of the War. Under his wise and gentle influence the office in Great College Street became reminiscent of that delightful undergraduate existence which we had many of us left far behind; and we