they are concerned, no longer fits the case, though it was good enough in the days of their prosperity. Now, however, that popular and not official politics is the order of the day, they have had to renounce politics as a means of livelihood. Their instinct of self-preservation has made them realise the fact that, so soon as the body on which they have been feeding dies, the parasites must leave it for another home; and they have now turned their attentions to commerce, ranching or speculation. The reform has thus achieved one object of very great importance. It has reduced the professional political element and purified what is left; it has assured the return of those candidates who are most popular and most suitable; while finally it has awakened the interest of the working classes, whose labour forms one of the chief sources of the country's wealth. But this is not all. Much more has been effected than the mere interference with certain individuals or even groups. To-day, Congress is quite independent of the Executive, which cannot now ensure, irrespective of popular opinion, that majority which formerly supported it as a matter of

course.

This great reform, however, could not be brought about without recourse to drastic measures, which were bound to react to some extent unfavourably upon the progress of national affairs. As mentioned above, Saenz Pena, in separating the Executive from the Legislature, proved himself a man of no small degree of courage; in thus nobly depriving himself of the support which had always been accorded to the Executive in the past, he was deliberately acting in the interests of the State and against those of his office as President. In abandoning this powerful assistance, he reckoned on being able to lean upon the better feeling and patriotism of Congress. Public opinion, however, had not yet grown quite accustomed to the new order of things; and the people had not entirely thrown off their hereditary apathy. President Pena did not receive the full measure of support he so justly deserved. As for Congress, as might have been foreseen, a certain amount of hostility has been shown by those members who have suffered personally, or feel likely to suffer, from this administrative cleansing. The President, far from wishing to

lessen his isolation, deemed it expedient rather to accentuate it, in order to bring the fact more clearly before the eyes of the people; he deliberately took this course in order to keep himself free from dangerous associations with any interested parties in the future.

He

In the Argentine, however, the President of the Republic is at the same time head both of the State and the Cabinet. He ought, therefore, to be in complete accord with the legislators who are called to lend him their aid in the control of the affairs of the nation. can, in fact, only act through his ministers, in consequence of which Saenz Pena's power of action was crippled to a very considerable extent. The attitude which he thought fit to take up to ensure the success of his schemes injured him in many ways and caused great friction between Congress and Executive. The former is clearly hostile, though its opposition is not collective, open or decided; it shows itself rather in individual reprisals, accompanied by a great measure of petty shuffling and inconsistency. This discord is mainly due to circumstances and not to any disagreement on general principles; and in all probability it will not last long, as it is to the interest of both the Executive and the Legislature that they should be in accord with one another.

But it must not be forgotten that the Argentine is a Federal Republic, which means that, in order that this great reform shall become an effective reality throughout the country, it is necessary for each province to enforce it within its own boundaries. Now the provinces are by no means so advanced or civilised as the capital. They present, moreover, an obstacle that time alone can surmount; they are very sparsely populated, and the people are so scattered that compulsory voting is very difficult to enforce. It was the abstention from voting, caused by the corruption of the professional politicians and the despotism of those in power, that, as we have seen, resulted in all the evils of the former e régime; and this tendency to abstention will be difficultese to overcome in provincial elections. Public opinionant however, in many of the provinces is gradually becomirhold hostile to the political system of the past; the 1 (also national election, as well as those for the choosinger, a the provincial governors, plainly showed it. The o

system is tottering, and it will not be very long before it has completely crumbled away, but in the meantime things must not be hurried too much. Projects of reform are under discussion in several of the provinces; officialdom is every day growing more feeble; public opinion is gradually gaining strength; and public morality is receiving more and more attention. When, at length, the provincial districts have learnt how to elect their representatives in the provincial parliaments in absolute freedom, as the provinces were able to return their deputies to Congress at the election of April 7, 1912, then indeed will the reform have become a national reality.

The eminent French writer on Argentine affairs, M. R. Levillier, reminds us in one of his recent works concerning political changes in general, that the complete assimilation of new ideas is not, like mere adaptation, a phenomenon of the will, but a slow and unconscious transfusion and absorption of new elements, accompanied by an evolution of the innermost feelings. It is essentially a change of sentiment, which is dependent on the racial instincts; it is not easily altered or moulded; it is inborn and cannot be lightly discarded, however great the desire to do so. The adaptation of the people to the constitution, the combination of theory and practice, has taken more than sixty years to accomplish, and has not yet been thoroughly accomplished in Argentina. Complete assimilation will require a much longer time, though apparent assimilation will be noticed long before it in fact exists. President Roque Saenz Pena thoroughly realised this; and neither the new President nor the Argentine people are likely to be deceived by appearances.

F. L. DEFRANCE.

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Art. 4.-A CHAPLET OF HEROES.

Ernest Psichari, Charles Péguy, Emile Nolly (Captain Détanger), Henri Alain-Fournier, André Lafon.

THE resident in a Catholic country envies sometimes the placid old women sitting in the twilight, telling their beads; their dim sight and thickened tympanums do not disturb this tranquil occupation; they seem secure against the demon of Ennui. Why should not we Anglicans institute, in the interests of the idle, the elderly, the meditative or the sentimental, an unconsecrated rosary of recollection, adapted to the events of our existence? As we fingered the chaplet-every bead of it representing a year of our past-when we came to the big bead we should linger and reflect, and try to draw a lesson from the evocation of that term of years. Or we might string a thread to commemorate the lovely places we have seen, recalling them on different days at different seasons, summoning thus from the dimmest haunts of our memories beauties too good to lose. Or we might count a chaplet of the Dead.

To-day I would tell my beads very briefly in memory of five French soldiers, men of letters by profession, who died for their country in the first months of the war. It was on them I chiefly counted to renew the spirit of literature in France. Yet (with the exception of Péguy, who was an eccentric genius) they were perhaps not more gifted than several others-than Paul Acker, for instance, or Léo Byram, among the hundred and fifty young writers who have fallen for France. They had not yet gathered in the finest fruit of their vintage, for (save Péguy, who was over forty) they were young. They belonged one and all-Péguy first and young Lafon last -to a generation in full reaction against the excessive intellectualism of their fathers and their elder brothers. Two of them were soldiers and explorers by profession, men who had seen life arduously enough, and death face to face, in African deserts and in colonial battles; these were Captain Détanger (Emile Nolly) and Lieutenant Ernest Psichari; Alain-Fournier stood on the threshold of politics as secretary to Claude Casimir-Périer (also fallen); Charles Péguy was a publisher, a printer, a

polemist, as well as a prose-writer and a poet; while André Lafon was a budding schoolmaster. Not one of them was an out-and-out man of letters of that thoroughgoing and professional sort whose horizon is bounded by the twy-peaked summit of Parnassus and the roofs of Grub Street. They were men of action, doers, not dreamers.

Of course, all of them had served their term of military service in the regiment, and had thus, beside their official calling, another-the career of arms. All felt, with a precision and an acuity that their forefathers could not guess, the importance of the regiment-of the army-and the corresponding humiliation of belonging to a country that has been vanquished in arms, but has not yet avenged and redeemed that disgrace. It is, in fact, the army of a nation which determines the language it shall speak, the laws it shall obey, the trade it shall make, and even the Church it shall worship in, since all these follow the conqueror. These young men considered themselves to belong to a generation—to a series of generations-sacrificed in 1870, deprived by that defeat of their place in History. The little things they did they could not love; the great things they fain would do they were not allowed to undertake; so that they felt like the sons of a bankrupt emperor, unable to forget their Empire or their bankruptcy. For compare the France of fifty years ago with the France of Caillaux! No amount of literary glory, or scientific invention, or artistic refinement, or material prosperity, could console this ardent generation. They murmured with their spokesman, Péguy:

'Où sont nos mourants et nos morts? Nous n'avons même pas renversé un gouvernement! Nous mourrons tous dans notre lit! Et je ne m'intéresse pas aux personnes qui mettent cinquante ans à mourir dans leur lit.'

So deep in them did the taste for action and activity descend that Péguy declared in one of his most characteristic pages:

'Ne peuvent pas mener une vie chrétienne, c'est-à-dire ne peuvent pas être chrétiens, ceux qui sont assurés du pain quotidien . . . Et ce sont les rentiers, les fonctionnaires, les moines. Peuvent seuls mener une vie chrétienne, c'est-à-dire