be amended or determined. Neither Mr. Dicey nor any one else really helps us, who does not deal with the political case that is legitimately built up from this proposition. Both parties have this year explained their view of the method proper for a settlement of the land question. The foundation of the Liberal plan was the interposition of a central Irish body between the purchasing tenant and the lending State. The Conservative plan, as foreshadowed in announcements made by the Government in August, rested on securities to be found, not in a central body, but in Local Authorities, and these authorities would have to be created. On either plan, the agrarian transformation must be accompanied by political reconstruction. The connection of each question with the other, and of both with social order, cannot be shaken or loosed. Nothing but his entanglement in the purely formal elements of constitutional discussion can explain the curious failure of so acute and honest a disputant as Mr. Dicey to seize the real purport of his own statement which I have just quoted, or to work it out to a practical conclusion. His misapprehension of the policy which he condemns is complete. The policy may deserve to be condemned, but it has a claim to be understood.

The Land Purchase Bill (says Mr. Dicey, p. 268), even when discarded, remains an involuntary exposure of the futility of the Gladstonian Constitution, and of the unsoundness of the principle on which the demand for Home Rule rests.

If in dealing with Ireland we must calm agrarian misery before satisfying national aspirations, this necessity is all but a confession that Irish unrest is due far more to desire for a change in the land laws than to passionate longing for national independence.

'No friend of Italy,' he interjects parenthetically, 'ever suggested that Italian independence should be accompanied by a loan from Austria.' Quite true, because Italy demanded complete independence, and the Irish leaders do not, and there is an end of our author's parenthesis. The Land Purchase Bill was not an expedient for 'calming agrarian misery' at all; it was independent of any opinion as to the comparative share of agrarian discontent and national aspirations in the production of Irish unrest. It was an endeavour, inspired not by too large equity towards the landlords, but by the sound political motive of rallying the Irish peasantry to the institutions of the country, and interesting them in stability and order. We have been taunted with refusal to leave the settlement of the land to the Irish Parliament. The answer is obvious. Can any settlement be made without resort to British credit? If not, it cannot be made without the British Parliament. The Land Bill may have been a prudent or an imprudent plan for establishing a system of single ownership. But every day makes it more and more clear, as some of us have never ceased to maintain, that whether you grant large autonomy or small, whether you decide on twenty years of coercion or continue to stagger stupidly along the old, devious, slovenly,

breakneck road, in any case a measure for land purchase is rendered, both by social and political conditions, the most assured and inexorable of all certainties. The only question is whether it shall be a measure financially and politically safe, or one in both these respects extremely dangerous; and that question no statesman can answer who does not perceive, as I have just said, that the connection between agrarian aims and general political feeling is the dominant peculiarity of Irish affairs. That connection was recognised by the policy of the late Government, and it is fatally ignored in the criticisms of Mr. Dicey. He describes the Land Purchase Bill (p. 139) as saying, in effect, to the United Kingdom:

Pay fifty millions, that, without any injustice to Irish landlords, Irish tenants may be turned into landowners, and may then enjoy the blessings of Home Rule freed from all temptation to use legislative power for purposes of confiscation. The advice (he proceeds) may in one sense be sound, but prudence suggests that if the fifty millions are to be expended, it were best first to settle the agrarian feud, and then to see whether the demand for Home Rule would not die a natural death. French peasants were Jacobins until the revolution secured to them the soil of France. The same men when transformed into landed proprietors became the staunch opponents of Jacobinism. It is in any case the interest of England to see whether, say in a generation, the existing or further changes in the tenure of land may not avert all necessity or demand for changes in the constitution.

All this is very reasonably said. Mr. Mill said exactly the same nearly twenty years ago, though, unlike Mr. Dicey, he admitted that the 'administration of local justice, local finance, and other local affairs, needed the hand of the reformer even more urgently than in England.' The changes in the tenure of land recommended by Mill were generally repudiated in England at the time, as violent and revolutionary, but they were accepted by the Legislature in 1881. Yet Irish unrest is as bad as ever. The ruinous interplay between agrarian and political forces, each using the other for ends of its own, will never cease so long as the political demand is in every form resisted. That, we are told, is all the fault of the politicians. Be it so; then the Government must either suppress the politicians outright, or else it must interest them in getting the terms of its land settlement accepted and respected. Home Rule on our scheme was, among other things, part of an arrangement for settling the agrarian feud.' It was a means of interposing between the Irish tenant and the British State an authority interested enough and strong enough to cause the bargain to be kept. No doubt it is said that the Irish authority would have had neither interest nor strength enough to resist the forces making for repudiation. Would those forces be any less irresistible if the whole body of the Irish peasantry stood, as Land Purchase minus Self-Government makes them to stand, directly face to face with the British State? This is a question that Mr. Dicey might have been expected to consider, as he might well also have considered that other question, which lies unnoticed at the back of all

solutions of the problem by way of peasant ownership-Whether it is possible to imagine the land of Ireland handed over to Irishmen, and yet the government of Ireland kept exclusively and directly by Englishmen? Such a divorce is conceivable under a rule like that of the British in India: with popular institutions it is inconceivable and impossible.

Here we may leave the more general considerations raised by Mr. Dicey. To his strictly constitutional criticisms I hope, by the indulgence of the Editor, to be allowed to turn in a second, and happily a shorter article.

JOHN MORLEY.

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.

THE utterances of royal personages are sometimes very startling. They assume upon occasion the tone of gracious command which none may gainsay and live; but not unfrequently they perplex and dismay by their magnificent assumption of infinite possibilities of obedience. They come upon us, too, at such unexpected moments, and they come in such unexpected forms, that we-the weak ones of the earth, born to grovel and crawl and serve-actually do set out upon our audacious missions now and then, simply because we are bidden, and we actually get a little way upon our journey, and drop down exhausted only when the eyes that cheer but not inebriate are no longer turned our way.

Thus it came to pass with me a week or two ago. I wa in a desponding mood, drearily speculating upon the question whether on this side of the grave I should ever be in funds enough to buy a certain set of five precious folios which for years have made the tenth commandment for me a lifeless fossil idol, when her royal highness's voice came to me in the silence, with these mysterious words: If you consulted my wishes you would begin upon The Serpent that swallows his Tail.

Tremendous task! The immense undertaking indicated by these words has advanced no further than its bewitching title, though prodigious preparations have been made for a start. During an indefinite number of years it has been brooded over. Piles of notes and reams of manuscript attest the fact. What I may venture to call the basis of the Serpent has been of the broadest. Even Mr. Cadaverous more than once allowed that in competent hands the Serpent might prove a fertile and not uninteresting subject for an opusculum.' 'But,' adds Mr. Cadaverous, with one of his never-failing quotations, 'you must allow me to say

Dic aliquid dignum promissis. Incipe!' Alas! I go on with the quotation, and do not begin.

On the eventful morning referred to, however, her royal highness would not let the matter drop; she stooped beneath her accustomed dignity she even went as low as menace. Was it not just a little too bad that a real princess should frighten her slave with such words as these:

'One of these days I know you'll die; and then you'll be sorry, and the Serpent will die with you, and the progress of humanity will be arrested; and '—for I smiled a green and melancholy smile— 'you are really too provoking! . . . Well, then, why don't you write about the . . .?'

'Hush! my dear, hush! the British public would never stand it. The Serpent must wait. As for that other, he must not be known by so profane a title: the world would denounce it as unclerical and unseemly. Think of another.'

Then call it the Old Magician-the Real Magician-Treasure Trove-anything; only do write, and don't dawdle!'

I sighed. I trembled, and promised to obey. And thus it came to pass that I gave myself up to the charge that was laid upon me, and I began by writing the heading to the first chapter-' Of buried treasure in general.'

Among all my acquaintances above the lower middle class I know no man of forty-except he be a country parson-who has not written a book, or who has not an account at a bank. We all write books, and we all keep a banking book. Yet there was a time when human beings did neither the one nor the other. Also there was a time when books were common, much written, much read, and when bankers were not common. Nevertheless in those days money changed hands-money in lumps with a stamp upon it, money by weight that was the price of lands and cattle and men's lives, and things much more precious than even these. The world had grown quite an old world when Pasion-the Rothschild of Athens-turned over the leaves of his ledger to find out how Lycon of Heraclea stood in his books. It was a much older one when Julius Cæsar persuaded the bankers at Rome to make those heavy advances to him as he was preparing for the pillage of Gaul. But a thousand years after Cæsar's time Europe had clean forgotten all about the finance of the earlier ages, and banking, as we understand the word, was a thing unknown. Yet men traded, and bargained, and got gain, and some grew rich, and some grew poor, and some were thriftless and some were grasping— as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.

But in process of time the art of money-making advanced again. Great capitalists rose up, fortunes were made, estates changed hands. The great men doubtless had their own methods of managing their money matters. The Jews, the Carausini (who bought out the Jews), and other such financiers, made their accounts and negotiated loans with kings and potentates and throve surprisingly as a rule, though by no means invariably. That was all very well for the big men embarked in important speculations; but what was the small man to do the man who went about from village to village and from