allies the best of your men. But the direction, the ideas, the control, will be in the hands of the American Trust. The Trust is virtually supreme in the United States, and when it has achieved the economic subjection of the old world it may consolidate the plutocratic system, against which the American people may be powerless. Yes, the evolution of the American Trust has become a great international and European question. In Germany they are very uneasy. Things are bad there, and in England also you are likely to have a difficult time."

"Yes," I said, "and therein lies the hope of the situation, for in the immediate future the road to salvation lies along the path of tribulation. It is a Via Dolorosa, but in no other way can we escape from the city of destruction. Now, as in old times, the people do not seem to be able to stand prosperity, and are only brought back to their true ideals by the pressure of adversity."

"In America that road seems to be closed to us at present," said Mr. Lloyd. "We have a surplus of fifteen millions with a much greater potential surplus."

"Whereas," I interrupted, "in England a deficit of fifty millions and increased taxation "- -we were talking on Budget night-" is the first rumble of the thunder of Sinai which the man in the street has heard since the moral influenza of Jingoism seized possession of the nation."

"Nevertheless, in no country but America," said Mr. Lloyd, "is there such a well-organised, vigorously sustained campaign against this malady of the modern State as there is among the band of thinkers and reformers who are combatting the evil in the United States."

"And how do you find things in England?" I asked. "In the House of Commons there are a few individuals who have their minds open to the light of the coming day, among whom I should put John Burns very nearly in the first rank. Burns impresses me much. He will go far. His career has only begun. In the near future he will play a great part."

Yes," I said, "I am afraid we are on the verge of the revolutionary era here, and the old order will pass. And what do you think of the Liberal Party?"

"It has perished," he said, "with the fulfilment of its old ideals. What is called the Liberal Party has no mandate, has no programme, and therefore has no courage and no influence. It seems to me that it was buried with Mr. Gladstone, and it will know no resurrection. The future lies with other men and other ideals." "If you see no light in Westminster," I said, "what do you think about Spring Gardens ?"

"Yes," said Mr. Lloyd, "the London County Council is doing good work; but what fills me with the greatest hope is the progress of the co-operative movement in England. That seems to me one of the greatest things of our time-the most hopeful, the most promising."

I had previously remarked to Mr. Lloyd that I thought he did not need to take so gloomy a view about the Trusts, inasmuch as, if they were successful, their success would demolish the one great obstacle which had hitherto offered an insuperable impediment to the realisation of the collectivist ideal. It had hitherto been believed that the human brain, judged by its failures when it attempted to direct great administrations, was inadequate to the efficient oversight and control of a great system of State Socialism-videlicet our War Office. But if the syndicates were to prove that great national industries could be organised and controlled by a few individuals, the chief practical argument against Socialism would disappear.

Mr. Lloyd objected. He said that the American Trust

only proved that a few individuals might have the organising genius that had been displayed by areat military conquerors in the past, but their success did not prove that the people as a whole were capable of producing men able to control such great organisations.

"But," he went on to say, "I think your co-operative movement in England does prove that the people have got the capacity, and it is to my mind the brightest point in the whole dark horizon. I was particularly struck, for instance," continued Mr. Lloyd, "with the scheme of co-operative housing which has been elaborated by your co-operators, and which, I believe, is to be publicly inaugurated this very week. According to Mr. Henry Vivian, who for the last year or two has been engaged in elaborating the project, the system is extraordinarily successful in avoiding the pitfalls into which similar schemes have fallen in the past. No doubt you are all interested in the housing schemes of the London County Council; but there is something infinitely more attractive, to my mind, in a co-operative system which enables working men to build their houses and to become their own landlords, without coming upon the rates, and without establishing an antagonism of interests between the municipal landlord and the individual tenant. There is no social experiment the development of which I shall watch with greater interest that this co-operative building scheme of Mr. Vivian's. It seems to me that it is along such lines that the progress to a happier state of society is to be secured."

It is this passionate faith in co-operation which attracted Mr. Lloyd irresistibly to New Zealand, where the greatest co-operative experiment ever made by man is being carried out under the direction of the Colonial Government. Mr. Lloyd's book, "Newest England," which, strange to say, has not yet been published in England, but has excited immense interest and met with a most favourable reception in America, records his experiences as a traveller who visited the Great Britain of the Pacific, not as a tourist, but as a keen observer of the phenomenon of social evolution. "Newest England' is a charming book, brightly written, crammed with facts, and instinct on every page with the inspiration of a great enthusiasm. I gently chaffed Mr. Lloyd for the excessive admiration of the New Zealanders.

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You put no vinegar in your salad," said I. "Well," said Mr. Lloyd, "when I wrote 'Wealth against Commonwealth,' I came to the conclusion that I would not resort to the ordinary devices of book-makers by putting in qualifying words which blunt the sharp outlines of the salient facts. I was determined I would tell the truth exactly as I saw it, without any qualifications or modifications whatever."

"And so," I answered, as you painted the devil jet black, you carried out the same principle to the other extreme, and painted New Zealand as an archangel white as snow."

"I painted it as I found it," said Mr. Lloyd. "The book is the expression of the impressions left upon my mind as the result of a long, painstaking examination of New Zealand as it is to-day. It is a picture not without shadows. There are economic difficulties ahead, the chief of which may be traced to the excessive dependence of New Zealand upon the English market and the English Stock Exchange; but take it all in all, the chief doubt is whether there can be any sequel worthy to follow so splendid a first volume. You may think that I am indulging in hyperbole, but I am speaking in sober fact when I say that from the point of view of human progress, and the evolution of civilised society

from barbarism towards a state of tolerable happiness, the French Revolution is an insignificant phenomenon compared with the importance of the effort which New Zealand has made in the last ten years."

Ten years! Then it was since the first number of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS was published that this great epoch-making revolution has been worked out in the Pacific, while the rest of the world was too much engaged in its own affairs to spare it more than a passing thought. Even now it is a somewhat curious reflection upon the absent-mindedness of John Bull that, despite all the efforts of Mr. Reeves and others, it has needed an American citizen to come along and interpret to him the immense significance of what our colonists have been doing.

Mr. Lloyd has many qualifications for the task. He is a man of cosmopolitan sympathies, of singular detachment of mind, of English, Dutch, and Huguenot descent, who, after spending his earlier youth in the fierce struggle of Chicago journalism, was able to withdraw in the prime of his manhood to his rural retreat at Winetka, in which he studied with philosophic eye the phenomena which indicate the trend of the evolution of modern society. Mr. Lloyd is a direct lineal descendant of Whalley, the regicide, and few things gave him more pleasure during his present visit than to find a statue of the greatest regicide of the moment, Oliver Cromwell, standing sovereign and alone in the enclosed space outside Westminster Hall, within which the warrant was signed for the execution of Charles Stuart, which took place at Whitehall Banqueting House. That Mr. Lloyd is a democrat and a co-operator, if not a Socialist, goes without saying, and his standpoint must be taken into account in listening to his narrative of what New Zealand has done and has tried to do. But even after the discount has been made, his book on Newest England" forces the suggestion upon the mind whether, considering that the Liberal Party has gone bankrupt and has neither leaders, programme, mandate, nor ideal, British democracy might do worse than place a Government in power with a mandate to New Zealandise Great Britain. Thirty years ago no charge was so frequently brought against English Radicals as a supposed desire on their part to Americanise the British Constitution. For the last ten years, if Lord Salisbury ventured to allow one gleam of hope to flicker in the sombre chamber of despondency in which he habitually dwells, it has been supplied by his dream that some day the British democracy, in the interests of Conservatism, might graft some distinctive features of the American constitution upon the Constitution of our own country. To Americanise the Constitution has ceased to be a taunt in Tory mouths; it has almost become a Conservative ideal. English Progressives must, therefore, go further afield, and here we have in Mr. Lloyd's book a formula ready to hand. Why not NewZealandise Great Britain?

Of course it is impossible to transport en bloc the legislation which suits a community of three-quarters of a million people scattered over the virgin islands of the Pacific, whose area is almost co-extensive with that of Great Britain, to the forty millions of people who live in the United Kingdom. Neither will it be reasonable to contend that measures which have produced excellent results in a very new community with unexhausted resources, would produce the same measure of success if adopted in an old country such as ours.

On the other hand, it may be contended that evils against which New Zealand has taken such energetic and original precautions, are infinitely greater in this country than they are in any of the colonies, and that if the colonies

need to adopt such measures to cope with social evils and to secure the happiness of the people, how much the more necessary is it to adopt even stronger measures of the same kind in order to cope with the evils from which we are suffering at home. Not even the greatest fanatic of a formula would contend that the principle of New Zealandising Great Britain would entail the adoption in detail of the New Zealand legislation. All that is meant by the demand is, that the nation, as a whole, should undertake, through its elected representatives and executive government, the co-operative organisation of society in such a way as to produce not only the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but the greatest degree of self-respect and the greatest development of the spirit of patriotic citizenship.

The last sentence in Mr. Lloyd's book gives the key to its author's conception of the New Zealand idea. He says:

In New Zealand the best stock of civilisation was isolated by destiny for the culture of reform, as the bacteriologist isolates his culture of germs. New Zealand has discovered an anti-toxin of revolution-a cure of monopoly by monopoly. New Zealand, because united, was able to lead; because she has led, others can follow.

"The New Zealand policy," again says Mr. Lloyd, "is a deliberate exploitation of both capitalists and proletariat by the middle class, which means to be itself the fittest that survives. The capitalists are taxed progressively, and the proletarian is given land and labour that he may also become a capitalist to be'taxed. Towards this fixed purpose the people of all parties are moving steadily. They mean to mould their institutions of taxation, land tenure, public ownership, etc., so that there shall never develop among them those social pests the millionaire and the pauper."

II. WHAT NEW ZEALAND HAS DONE. Instead of explaining any further what Mr. Lloyd found in New Zealand, it is best to make one good solid extract from his concluding chapter, in which he thus sums up the record of ten years' work :

The policy of taxation is reversed. The general property tax on improvements, enterprise, and poverty is abolished, and the taxation for national purposes of land and incomes introduced. Taxation is taken off from capital that is working and put on capital that is idle. The small man, because small, is exempted, and the rich man, because rich, is made to pay more, progressively, the more land and income he has. The burden of the old property tax forced the poor men who worked their places to sell out to the rich neighbour, who escaped taxation and grew rich by making no improvements. The new tax is planned especially to make the rich landowner sell to his small neighbours or to the Government, which will subdivide and sell to them itself. The old taxes built up monopolies; the new taxes "burst them up." To check speculation, to equalise poverty and wealth-to prevent great estates-these are some of its avowed objects. "No man now dreams," an eminent New Zealander said, "of attempting to found a great landed estate in New Zealand."

The people, by the use of their powers as citizens, get land for themselves through the State by taking it back from the men to whom they have previously sold it, and who have added field after field into great monopolies. The people resume these lands by taxation, by purchase (if the owners are willing to sell), and by force of law if they will not sell. They divide the lands thus recovered into gardens, farms, and homesteads for the landless. But to break the vicious circle by which private property in land leads to speculation, rack-rents, foreclosure, depopulation and monopoly, the revolution institutes a new system of land tenure. It establishes the lease in perpetuity by the State with limitations of area, cultivation, and transfer. It

inaugurates a policy which is meant, ultimately, to make the State in New Zealand the owner of all the soil of New Zealand and the people all tenants of the one landlord who will never speculate, nor confiscate, nor rack-rent, and whose monopoly is their monopoly.

In their public works policy the people establish themselves as their own contractors. The democracy begins the reform of the sweating system where all reforms should begin—at home— by abolishing it in its own work, doing away with the contractor and the contract system, with all its evils of sub-letting and of sweating the workmen and the work. It enters upon the practice of direct construction by the State of its own public works, and direct employment, without middlemen, of its own labour. The men hired by the new régime to build railroads, bridges, public buildings, make roads, etc., are taken by preference from those citizens who need work. In giving them work the new régime also gives them farms and homes from the public lands near by, or from the private estates which it buys and cuts up for that purpose. The working men themselves are made their own contractors, and taught, even the tramp and the casual, to work together co-operatively. The State as an employer sees and saves for the community the economic value of the labour of the old and incompetent, the unskilled and the tramp, which the private employer lets go to waste.

By compulsory arbitration the public gets for the guidance of public opinion all the facts as to disputes between labour and capital, puts an end to strikes and lock-outs, clears its markets and its civilisation of the scandals and losses of street fights between the buyers and sellers of labour, and enables both sides to make contracts without strike clauses for years ahead. It transfers the private wars of economic enemies to a court-room, as society had previously taken the private wars of the barons from the field into the court-room. By abolishing the contractor it abolishes the sweating system in public works, and it banishes the sweater in private industry by compulsory arbitration, with its power to fix minimum and maximum wages and all conditions of labour by forbidding the employment of boys and girls without pay, by the enactment of an advanced and minute code of factory laws, by regulating the hours of women and children, and so of

men.

of commissioners, independent of the people, to a Minister and Parliament dependent upon the people and responsive to public needs and public opinion. The railroad policy is changed from the use of the highways as moneymakers for the Treasury, relieving the general taxpayer at the expense of the producer, to their use as public utilities supplying that necessity of lifetransportation--at cost. The new policy is to lower rates, never to raise them, and to keep lowering them as profits increase. New lines are built for the people, not for the great landowners. The methods of construction are changed from private contract to co-operative work, largely by groups of unemployed, with special reference to the settlement of them and other landless people on the land.

The State takes over the management of the principal bank of the colony. It assumes the rôle of chief purveyor of credits to the commercial and financial interests, and so doing saves New Zealand from the panic of 1893.

The revolution of 1890 does more than follow the line of least resistance-it adopts the policy of most assistance. The commonwealth makes itself the partner of the industry of the people. The nation's railroads are used to redistribute unemployed labour, to rebuild industry shattered by calamity, to stimulate production by special rates to and from farms and factories, to give health and education to the school and factory population and the people generally by cheap excursions. To pay for the lands taken back from the private owners, the people get cheap money on Government bonds in London, and to equalise themselves with competitors nearer the world's markets, and to emancipate themselves from the usurer, the producers of New Zealand give themselves cheap money through the Advances to Settlers Act. Money is borrowed in London at Treasury rates, to be loaned to the individual in New Zealand at cost, so that a single citizen of New Zealand gets his money in London at the same rate as if he were the government-as in truth he is -pius only the small cost of the operation. Instructors are sent about to teach the people co-operation in work and in industry, like dairying, and money is advanced to assist in the erection of creameries. Bonuses are given for the development of new processes. Patents are bought up, to be opened to the people at Millions are spent on water-races and roads to foster mining. The Government gives free cold storage at the sea-coast and preparation for shipment for products to be exported. The firm of "Government and Co., Unlimited," is established-a partnership of the people as a State with the people as individuals, in agriculture, gold mining, and manufactures for home and abroad.

Women are enfranchised, and legislation for "one man, one vote," enfranchises men too, and puts an end to the abuses of On plural voting in Parliamentary and municipal elections. election day one can see the baby-carriage standing in front of the polls while the father and mother go in and vote, against each other if they choose.

Last of all, pensions are given to the aged poor. And this Fraternalism pays. In reducing railroad rates to the people as profits increase, the Government increases its profits faster than it reduces rates. The country is prosperous in every department- revenue, manufactures, commerce, agriculture. The democracy is a good business man. The State proves itself a successful money-lender and landlord. It makes a profit, and can lower its rents and rates of interest, and, unlike the private capitalist, does so.

So far Mr. Lloyd. How would Fraternalism do as the watchword for the Liberal Party of the future?

THE LOVE-LETTERS OF PRINCE BISMARCK.* THESE are two very delightful volumes, not so much because of the love that is in the letters as because of the pictures which they give of the man Bismarck, or, at least, one great side of him which is usually concealed from those who have read most about Bismarck in the papers. We see here the man himself as portrayed in a series of letters extending not only over his engagement, but over the whole of his married life, which, judging from this correspondence, appears to have been singularly happy. The first eighty-five pages are devoted to letters to his betrothed. The rest of the two volumes are the letters written from the husband to the wife.

One thing that will amaze most people who have had but a superficial knowledge of the real Bismarck is the close and unremitting study which he appears to have given to the Bible. There is one letter in particular, written to his betrothed immediately after their engagement, which is much more like a letter from an English Puritan than anything that might have been expected to issue from the pen of him who was to be known to fame as the Iron Chancellor. He reminds his wife of a conversation in which she had said that she would never have accepted him "had not God given me the key-hole and permitted me at least to peep through His door of mercy?" "That came into my mind," he said, “when I was reading I. Corinthians vii. 1, 5, 14 yesterday.” He goes on: Compare also Romans xiv. 22 and xv. 2; also particularly I. Corinthians iv. 5, viii. 2, ix. 20, also xii. 4, and the following further xiii. 2. All the first epistle to the Corinthians, seems to me to apply to the subject. We talked during that week or another one a great deal about the sanctity of doing good works. I will not inundate you with Scripture passages in this connection, but only tell you how splendid I find the Epistle of James, Matthew xxv. 24, and following :--Romans ii. 6, II. Corinthians v. 10, Romans ii. 13, I. John iii. 7, and countless others." Against my will," he adds, "I fall into spiritual discussion and controversies."

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There is a very interesting letter in which he refers to his mother, from which it appears that she was eminently psychic. He says that she did not go to church, and was much attached to Swedenborg, the prophecies of Prevorst, and the theories of Mesmer, Schubert, Justinus, and Merner, an enthusiasm that stood in strange contradiction to her otherwise cold intellectual clearness. Bismarck himself had this element in his nature. Не tells his beloved, "Why, we see miracles every minute, and nothing but miracles."

He explains to his wife that although he studies the Bible constantly, and believes that it contains the Word of God, still he is not able to accept all that is written in the Bible, inasmuch as it was transmitted and communicated to us by persons who were still subject to sin and misunderstanding.

On another occasion there is one very characteristic passage in which, after his marriage in 1853, he writes to his wife from Norderney:

I read Romans xii. . . . on a seaweed mattress, with the storm and rain rattling against the window. It is a chapter which makes one realise how weak in faith and how wicked one is. I

"The Love-Letters of Prince Bismarck." Edited by Prince Herbert Bismarck. With portraits. 2 vols. London: Heinemann, 1901. Price,

205.

would feed my enemy if he were hungry, but bless him-it would be a very superficial blessing were I to give it at all. May God make me better !

Alas! there is reason to fear that this must be numbered among one of the unanswered prayers, for if Bismarck was anything, to the end of his days he was a good hater. Another passage, written in 1859, when he was looking with misgiving into the future. He says:

I opened the Scriptures last evening at random, just to rid my anxious heart of politics, and my hand lighted immediately on the 5th verse of the 110th Psalm. (This is as follows: "The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of His wrath.") As God wills! It is, after all, only a question of time. Nations and people, folly and wisdom, war and peace -they come and go like waves, and the sea remains.

But it would be a great mistake to imagine that these letters are predominantly full of theological disquisitions. The same note runs through them all. In 1862 he writes to his "dearest heart" :

"The Lord has never yet forsaken me in an unexpected and unsolicited position, and my trust stands firm that He will not let evil come upon me in this, nor upon my health either." Happy is the man," he writes, just after the Franco-German war, Happy the man to whom God has given a virtuous wife who writes to him every day."

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But that was by no means the only cause of his happiness. Writing in 1865, after eighteen years of married life, he tells his beloved heart to "thank God with me for all the good He has bestowed on us since the honeymoon, enabling me to fix my inward gaze upon the home-hearth in the desert of political life, as the wanderer abroad on a stormy night gazes at the light of approaching shelter. God grant it may be so till the final return!"

Of domestic touches there are many-too many to be quoted here. To one, however, I must refer. It is that in which he announces the birth of his first child, “a healthy, well-formed girl, about nine pounds in weight." He writes to his father-in-law :

"Johanna lies still and tired yet cheerful and composed behind the curtain, the little creature for the time under coverlets on the sofa, squalling off and on. I am quite glad that the first is a daughter. If it had been a cat, I should have thanked God on my knees the moment Johanna was rid of it. It is really a desperate business."

"All is going very well, only the cradle is still lacking, and the little miss must camp meanwhile in a corn-basket. Johanna laments her daughter's thick nose. I think it no larger than it has a right to be."

One more extract, and we will leave this interesting collection. They had had a great deal of trouble about a wetnurse, which at last was satisfactorily settled. He writes:

"Your last letter, in which you inform me of the happy solution of the wet-nurse difficulty, took a real load off my heart. I thanked God for His mercy, and could almost have got drunk from sheer cheerfulness. May His protection continue henceforth to guard you and the little darling.

Of the political allusions which occur in these volumes I have not left myself room to speak, but I must, in conclusion, quote one line from his letter written on July 5th, from London. He says:

"It was very pleasant there, but the English ministers know less about Prussia than about Japan and Mongolia, and they are not any cleverer than ours."

From which it would seem that we have not changed much in forty years.