the relationship of every proper citizen to the State to which he owes allegiance, yet on all sides we hear the cry, 'Let the State support every one and everything. Let the State pay.' Such a doctrine is vulgar and unmanly because it teaches men to shirk responsibility, and it leads to private and public corruption. The Government clerk need not trouble to use Government stationery with care; the Government can pay for it: the Government does. The higher official abates his vigilance in curbing extravagance and waste; the Government can afford to lose it does. The private individual observes and says, 'Why should I continue to stint myself to support hospitals and national charities? Let the State do it.' Mr Hopkinson puts the case concisely.

'Lazarus lies at my gate, truly a disgusting sight. . Manifestly he must be moved at once, for daily he displeases me more. My own conscience officiously tells me that I must set limits to my expenditure upon sumptuous fare so that I may relieve Lazarus at my own expense. Here, indeed, is an unhappy choice. Either I must surrender a little of my wealth or Lazarus will cause my conscience to discomfort me on each occasion when I pass my gate. But fortunately

...

many others are writhing upon the prongs of the same dilemma. Being ingenious fellows, we set up a collective conscience, whose indignation touching the condition of Lazarus waxes so great that at length we remember that Dives is so much richer than we, and joyously make a law compelling him to provide succour for the poor man' (pp. 106, 107).

The people must be

'taught the truth concerning the functions of the State. As long as, deceived by the demagogues, they believe it to be a beneficent providence, so long is there grave peril that a sudden enlightenment as to its real nature may destroy civilization. Furthermore, they cannot be liberated from the wily coils of the demagogues until they cease to form a crowd, and thus once more become intelligent individuals capable of understanding that the State is no more than a convenient agreement between the inhabitants of a defined geographical area' (p. 111).

He discerns a menace to civilisation in the herd instinct which urges the mass of the people to merge

individual personalities in the crowd. Almost all are afraid of being alone either physically or intellectually.' The herd instinct is parasitic; it abhors the spaciousness of solitude, silence, thought, wherein a man must be himself or perish. While individual men and women 'are marvellously good and wise, as a crowd they are almost always foolish and evil.' And against the submersion of the rarer, or individual, part of human nature in the baser, or multiple, Mr Hopkinson urges 'the long-forgotten truth that progress comes. . . only from the enlightened self-sacrifice of the few. . . . And if, keeping this purpose always before us, we devote our lives to a service more exacting than that which war demanded of us, perhaps we may show that the soldier's religion is no mere empty superstition' (p. 114). Men will never be free until those who rule . . . renounce all greed and ambition and become greatest by being the least, able to rule the people because they love them, and able to love the people because they serve them' (p. 121). Again, the religion of the soldier.

Readers of Mr Hopkinson's former book, 'The Hope of the Workers,' will remember his shrewd blows dealt at Socialism, that monstrous deceit which men try to dignify or to excuse, according to their various idiosyncrasies, by terming it a Christian, or political, or economic system for reforming the world. 'Socialism is no more than the belief that present plenty is cheaply purchased at the price of future security,' says Mr Hopkinson, wherefore the practice of such a political and economic theory must result in a destitution whence none but an autocrat can rescue the people' (p. 129).

'The Socialist must of necessity be a pessimist, and no believer in the power of an individual to rule his universe. For he will have it that each individual is nothing more than a fragment of the crowd,' and 'that which the mob for the moment covets is to the Socialist the supreme good. For to him it is more blessed to receive than to give, and the immediate fulfilment of material desire is the golden calf which he sets up for worship. Shall a man, he asks, be good or happy if he have not a high standard of physical comfort? . . . For no Socialist is able to distinguish between law and ethics. To him morality is the will of the majority; and if in a nation there be many rich and few poor, the former may

rightly, in his view, take from the latter even that which they have. For in such a community, if the control of the means of production and distribution be democratic, the rich majority is able by law to deprive the poor minority of its little store, and to justify this action by the cogent plea that the latter is less able to put it to good use' (pp. 133, 134).

Mr Hopkinson believes the antidote for the ills of Socialism, as for selfish demagogy, to be Aristocracy-the control of the indefinite and ignorant many by the disciplined and enlightened few; and by 'ignorant' we do not mean the unlettered, but those who would subordinate everything to material good, and claim that to snatch the utmost of material advantage from life is true advancement and the aim of civilisation. To such the way of the Aristocrat is foolishness; they cannot and 'they do not understand that he who lies soft while others suffer is guilty of a discourtesy befitting none save the proletariat. . . . Good manners is a matter not of striking a balance of material effects, but rather of refraining from the taking of advantage of any kind and of abstaining from the very appearance of that evil. He who will not thus avoid discourtesy to his poorer neighbour is but a common fellow in no way fit to be believed in or obeyed. . . . The rediscovery of this lost principle of Aristocracy will mark the beginning of a nobler and happier age, and the well-being of the many will once again be assured by the self-sacrifice of the few' (pp. 141-144).

Service and self-sacrifice (religio militis) being the root of Aristocracy, we may easily perceive why the Socialist and the Demagogue are allied against the Aristocrat and the Soldier. Yet he who follows the soldier's religion will find that this true aristocracy and political progress are no impossible ideals, but that the latter arises out of the former.

Of Bolshevism, the logical outcome of Socialism unrestrained, Mr Hopkinson writes with fitting gravity. 'We, our allies, and our former enemies are now confronted with a menace about which there can be no doubt. The beast in man long chained has broken out. The Bolshevik's ideal (if one may so degrade that word) is the apotheosis of the brute through the dictatorship of the lowest and most selfish of the human race, and all Europe is

...

'now confronted with a menace, . . . a direct and terrible challenge to the whole conscious evolutionary process which has suppressed the brute in man.' The new diabolism teaches that there are many things which should be done ... simply because they are wrong. Anything which helps to hurry man back to the beast is to be fostered. . . . Selfsacrifice is mocked, duty derided, truth flouted, and beauty defouled. . . . The dictatorship of the lowest is to bring us back to the primitive communism of the jungle. Selfishness and greed are to be our guiding-stars. . . . Religion must be rooted out because all true religions teach that progress comes from love, while the Marxists hold that progress comes only from increasing hate.'

This great wickedness, flooding across Asia,' will seek to corrupt the West with its foul cult, so that whether it involves a physical war waged with weapons of destructive invention, or the more deadly warfare 'between mind and mind, nothing can withhold men from a period of retrogression save only some ideal transcending all the great motives in the past have made them glad to suffer and to die' (pp. 189, 190, 191). That transcendent ideal of self-sacrifice the soldier's religion upholds before the world.

The New Age the soldiers fought to bring in is thus found to be one of warfare, both spiritual and physical. They saw the Vision Splendid of 'the man made God, on whom lay all the griefs and all the joys of all men who had been, are, and shall be till the end of time.' The young soldiers who inherit the New Age, and will presently be called upon to direct it, are summoned to a life of toil and struggle in which, if they be true soldiers, they shall find adventure, victory, life itself, even though they fall before the years of fruition. And the old soldiers who have seen and followed the Vision and have drunk deep of the cup of pain and service, who have learned that 'only through service comes love, and only through love comes knowledge of the truth which makes men more than men'-these pass into the shade, content to be forgotten. To the young soldiers, says the author,

we leave our sad record of faults and follies and failures, of noble aims abandoned and opportunities missed. But we leave to them also a torn and blood-stained chart which, if they follow it faithfully, will bring them at last clear of the

swamp in which we wandered, and full in sight of towering peaks which we can never view. That is our legacy, . . . and if they think that we have done anything for them, they can repay us only by succeeding where we have manifestly failed' (p. 194).

But is it failure-is non-attainment necessarily failure? Did Moses fail because he entered Canaan only after death? Did Gordon fail, whose death was the first step towards the liberation of the Sudan? Or Raleigh, dying on the block amid the wreck of all his dreams? There is a failure more splendid than success, and it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.' If the soldiers of the New Age win through by aid of that blood-stained chart, theirs indeed shall be the glory of achievementbut whose the grace?

The book would not be what it is, nor would it be by a true soldier, if it ended on a note of gloom, uncertainty, or ill-content. Mr. Hopkinson desires for himself and his comrades a gift from life.

'Our labours and our wounds give us at least a claim to yet another fight before the end. Our experience has shown us glimpses of another world of strange experience, and that untravelled universe we will explore till one by one we drop beside the trail. Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek that newer world. Put on the battered armour once again, close up the sadly thinning ranks, and once again forward to meet whatever toil or gay adventure fate may bring!'

So, as we close this little book of valour and sincerity, we lift our eyes and see the onward and upward march of the true soldiers, whom life cannot daunt nor death dismay. So, watching them, we see beyond them their goal, which also may be ours-the steadfast shining glory of the Eternal Hills.

'For the destiny, whereof they are worthy, drew them unto this end, and made them forget the things that had already happened, . . . that Thy people might pass a wonderful way.'

E. M. E. BLYTH.