as he may be found guilty of wasting his substance, or of increasing the national expenditure for purely selfish ends, or of allowing sickness to spread in order that he may avoid inconvenience.

The concealment of disease among farm stock is far more serious than it was years ago when transport facilities were few and trouble could be localised. Today, when motor vans and lorries have supplemented the normal traffic of rail and road, it is possible to pass animals from place to place with great rapidity and to dispose of the sick or ailing without regard to regulations and without much risk of inquiry. Honest farmers, and they are in the great majority, refrain from doing these things; but, on the other hand, few of them are sufficiently public-spirited to denounce offenders living in the same district, and if you ask them why, they will tell you that the other man's business is not theirs, they don't interfere with him, and would themselves resent interference. This is the spirit that accounts so largely for the failure of co-operation, and for a certain lack of response to efforts made to help the industry as a whole.

It is, in truth, no far cry from modern mechanical developments to the maintenance of clean land and the strict observance of regulations framed in the public interest. We may well be on the eve of an agricultural Renaissance, all the signs favour one. The hard work of the farm is being entrusted in ever-increasing measure to paraffin and petrol. The risks that dog the steps of the farmer are being removed one by one. He stands equipped not only with effective machinery but with new breeds of corn, while in the matter of animal nutrition, our knowledge is greater to-day than it has ever been. But how can the industry do justice to its opportunities if the farmer will not clear his stacks and buildings from vermin and his fields from weeds, if he will not notify contagious or infectious diseases on the stroke of their occurrence, and see that his land is in proper state to receive his live stock? The farmer needs all the help that science and the engineer can bring to him, but if his industry, which is still the first in the kingdom, is to enjoy a measure of prosperity that will reach to the rank and file, he must put his own house in order. Nobody can do that for him.

S. L. BENSUSAN.

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ONE

Art. 3.—THE PLEASANTNESS OF EUROPEAN LIFE.

READERS of Bryce's 'American Commonwealth' will remember chapter cxi, entitled 'The Pleasantness of American Life.' Throughout the chapter a sharp contrast is drawn between social and economic conditions in the United States on the one hand, and in Great Britain and on the continent of Europe on the other. One phrase in particular arrests the reader's attention: 'The wretchedness of Europe is left behind.'

When this extreme statement is made by a man who was not an American, and who was a scholar, an incessant and observant traveller and man of affairs, it is not surprising that Americans themselves easily adopt the same point of view. George Washington advised his fellow-countrymen to keep clear of the entanglements of Europe, presumably because he thought that there were many evil things in Europe. Ever since then, the citizens of the United States have tended to follow his advice without question, and to assume that Europe was a poor sort of place, worth visiting only because of its heritage from the past, its Old Masters, its medieval churches, its romantic, ruined castles. To the ordinary inhabitant of Europe, life is supposed to be a burden. The Letters of Walter Hines Page,' even the letters written before the Great War, express the same kind sympathy: he speaks of the sorrows of Europe, melancholy, army-ridden, over-taxed.

The whole thing is a myth due partly to the selfsatisfied feeling, the sense of superiority, which seems to grow naturally in all new countries; it is also due, probably, to the sight of miserable immigrants from Eastern Europe huddling into the ports of New England, as if Europe were a plague which they were leaving behind them. In South Eastern Europe there was during the 19th century a good deal of misery, due to the effects of Turkish mal-administration. In Russia the conditions of life were badly spoken of, and the fault was imputed to the Tsarist régime. It is recognised now that the real misery of Russia has come about since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. But putting aside the consideration of Russia and South Eastern Europe, let us concentrate

on Western Europe. That life is pleasant there is proved by this: practically every inhabitant of Western Europe is proud of his particular country and likes his life there. From the new countries of the world there is a continuous back flow to Western Europe of people looking for cultured enjoyment; and most of the things which give grace and beauty to life in the New World are still drawn from the Old.

Bryce's chapter on the 'Pleasantness of American Life' is immediately followed by another on the Uniformity of American Life.' Thus, without consciously felt connexion in the author's mind, are the light and shade described. Life as described in chapter cxi is pleasant in America, because everybody has enough to eat and drink, and feels free and equal with his neighbours; but in chapter cxii life is apt to be dull, because town-planning and modern machinery and newness make everything look a little like everything else. Now, in Western Europe, no two things are the same. Nature, as in America, is infinitely diverse; but more than that, the civilisation of Western Europe, because it has grown throughout the ages and has not been made, is infinitely various. There is a variety of beautiful things everywhere in Western Europe.

Perhaps the first thing that an observer would notice is the pleasant aspect that Europe presents. It is a neat, well-arranged place, and highly picturesque. The scenes of pasture and stream, with a spire on the skyline, and cattle with a homestead in the middle distance, such as Hobbema or Ruysdael painted, or the woodland and hills with an ancient ruin, of the pictures of Claude, or the sunny meadows and cultivated fields of Corot, or the combination of mountains, lake, and medieval walled town which appear in the backgrounds of Raphael's or Titian's paintings, are not highly idealised or specially selected landscapes: they can be seen almost anywhere either in Holland, or France, or Italy, with the same skies and the same sunsets, the same brilliant colours, the same faces of men and things as when the Masters painted them. Western Europe is a garden: the town has never managed to absorb all the life of the countryside. As the population has grown, the land has come to be possessed by more and more individuals. The

ground has become too valuable to be wasted by walls and ditches. Therefore, the passer-by has the delicious Espectacle of miles of open fields. Large spaces possessed by a numerous population in severalty, varied in colour by the different crops which each peasant or farmer grows upon his patches of ground, are studded with the trim homesteads of the cultivators. The ideal scene of human occupation, to which, however, the larger States approximate, is a Swiss valley-not a sign of wall or fence, hedge or ditch, but a pleasant intermingling of vividly green grass land, blue flowering lucerne, yellowing corn, rows of potatoes and green food, with the neat farmhouses, the stacks of cut wood and faggots: from the uplands comes the tinkling of cowbells. In countries where there are no high pastures, no 'alps,' the cattle are tethered and daily take their ration, eating a large circular slice of clover or grass. Beauties of nature are found in every part of the world. In Western Europe there is the additional beauty which man has made and maintains, the result of two thousand years of adaptive cultivation.

Like the countryside, the towns of Europe have a pleasant, varied aspect. Most of them date from an age when architecture and craftsmanship flourished, when time and labour needed not to be spared in the beautifying of a building. Age alone does not necessarily make a thing beautiful, but it does, at least, usually gather romantic associations about a place. Besides, all men prefer beautiful things to ugly, so that in the passage of time the ugly buildings tend to be destroyed and the beautiful to survive. Thus it may be said of the hundreds of famous spots in European cities, the Grand' Place, for instance, of Brussels, or the Forum of Rome, that they have survived because of their intrinsic beauty, as well as for the romantic and historical associations which adhere to them.

It is, however, not merely the rich inheritance from the past that makes the towns of Europe lovely. It is also the unbroken tradition of art from this past. Taste and style have never been lost. The new buildings of Paris or of Barcelona or Berne, original and characteristic of their builders though they are, and the new gardens which every city has created, have a grace and harmony

which is due to the unbroken tradition of the Renaissance. If a visitor stands in the gardens of the Tuileries, with his back to the Louvre, and looks across the Place de la Concorde up the long avenue of the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe, he does not feel that he is in new surroundings, although many old things were destroyed in the last hundred years to make what he sees.

The essential virtue of almost every town or city of Western Europe is that it has a personality; it began as the work of some man or some few men, it is associated with their name and character, and it has grown outward from this kernel. Thus every city has a natural centre-a cathedral or a palace, or a market-place; and it has a hero or a heroine, priest, nobleman, merchant (or merchant-gild) who has set a mark upon it. Berlin is reminiscent of Frederick II, the Hague of William of Orange, Vienna of Maria Theresa, Old Paris of St Louis, New Paris of Napoleon III; the smaller cities have often more romantic heroes; Rome is the epitome of the political and spiritual influences of the West.

Western Europe is not rich; it is necessarily a place of hard work and frugality and moderate pleasures. Probably it is the bourgeois who gets most out of this kind of life; the educated professional man and his family dictate the normal standards in politics and society; the virtues of Europe are the prudent, kindly virtues of the bourgeois; and to his point of view the aristocracies on the one hand, and the labouring classes on the other, tend to approximate. The system of education is bourgeois; it is severe, it is literary, it is economical, and it requires considerable sacrifice. The higher education not merely costs money to the student, but it can only be pursued successfully by intense mental application and long hours of study. The standard is high, because it is the standard of a laborious and selfrespecting professional class in old countries with long traditions of scholarship and where the prizes of professional life are few in comparison with the many educated people striving for them.

As mind on the whole rules matter, and as the mind of Europe is most highly developed in the bourgeois, it is he who makes political and social life what they are.