fore we must base our calculations on the supposition that France, seeing no prospect, for the present at any rate, of regaining Alsace and Lorraine, will turn her attention to the other and I believe the chief object of her ambition-the restoration of her imperial prestige. Revenge on Germany being out of the question, France can only recover her prestige at the cost of some other power; and the power which presents most opportunities of attack, and is least likely to have on her side the sympathies of Europe, is undoubtedly England. As I have pointed out, a coalition against England is by no means an impossibility, and in any such coalition France is certain to take a leading if not the principal part. I cannot, therefore, disguise from myself that the dissatisfaction of France with her present position, and her almost morbid desire to vindicate her supremacy no matter at whose cost or to whose detriment, are a standing danger to England. In Egypt, Madagascar, Tonquin, Oceania, and indeed at every point where our interests come into contact, France has shown of late a disposition to thwart and embarrass England; and if circumstances should secure the French Republic the support or even the neutrality of the other continental powers, we may rest assured that this disposition would assume the form of active annoyance and encroachment.

This being the case, it is manifestly the interest of England to keep on friendly and even more than friendly terms with the one power by which France is kept under restraint, and whose influence is paramount at St. Petersburg. That power is Germany. For many reasons, of race, language, religion, character, and institutions, the English and German nations are natural allies. Our interests, moreover, tend in the same direction. We can assist Germany in her colonial aspirations, and can secure the safety of her commerce at sea in virtue of our maritime supremacy. Germany, on the other hand, in virtue of her military supremacy, can secure us against any risk to which we are exposed by the hopeless numerical inferiority of our standing army to those of the Continent. England and Germany, if united by a cordial alliance, would be the arbiters of Europe. To promote and facilitate such an alliance should, as I hold, be the main object of British statesmanship. But it is absolutely essential to any genuine understanding between the two countries that neither of them should stand in the way of objects which the other has at heart. In as far as I can see, Germany has no interest or motive to lead her to oppose herself to the consolidation and development of our colonial empire. On the other hand, England, if she pursues her old traditions of foreign policy, is very likely to find herself in antagonism to Germany on the object to which the latter country attaches the utmost importance, the modification of the map of Europe in such a way as to secure her from the risk of any further attack on the part of France, and to

provide for her full and free access to the seaboard of the German Ocean. The time has not come to examine these questions in detail. All I could wish is that Germany should understand that in any question between herself and France, and in any arrangements destined to improve her means of access to the sea, she will have the goodwill of the British Government and the British nation. The safety of England as against Europe lies in the support of Germany, and to secure that support we must be prepared if necessary to make the requisite sacrifices. If in this paper I have succeeded in calling attention to the general character of the sacrifices we are likely to be called upon to make, I for my part shall be well content.

EDWARD DICEY.

DEMETER AND THE PIG.

WHEN Mr. Newton excavated the temple and temple-plot, or temenos of Demeter, at Cnidos, he made two discoveries of very different character, and very great value. He first unearthed and restored to the light that beautiful marble statue of the Earth Goddess which is now one of the chief treasures of the British Museum. Even critics who find in Greek art a lack of expression are satisfied with the sweet melancholy and regret of the bereaved Demeter.'

The Demeter of Cnidos is the Mater Dolorosa of classical religion. The statue represents a woman still lovely, though no longer very young, seated in the attitude of grief, and her sweet and majestic face is worn with long regret. So may Demeter have sat by the sacred well, near the Eleusinian way, or on the mirthless stone of Eleusis, where, according to the myth, she brooded over her human sorrow, while nature mourned for sympathy, and the fields and vineyards ceased to bear fruits and grain. In this melancholy Demeter the happy faith of Hellas became a thing of sorrow, and acquainted with grief. The inevitable losses and sorrows of mortal affections were hallowed and made the more endurable to the religious mind by the example of the sorrowing Goddess, and by the hope, shadowed forth in the Mystery of the Return of Proserpine, that death does not bring an eternal separation. Nor was it merely the mystic promise of Hope that the belief in Demeter offered to the faithful. Her legend and her ritual are founded on and suggest to men's hearts the maternal sympathy of Nature. Like the lives of mortals, the life of Nature has its hours of hope and regret, seedtime and harvest, the passing of the grain into the darkness below the soil, and the raising again of the wheat in summer, the Descent, in mythic language, and the Resurrection of Corê, of the maiden Persephone. Here, then, are points where the religion of Hellas touches hands with the Christian faith and sentiment: both declare that a God has shared human grief, and Eleusis with her Mysteries repeats that parable of Saint Paul's concerning the burial and the resurrection of the seed sown.

This is the religious aspect of the myth of Demeter; such were See Mr. Newton's Halicarnassus, plate LV., and pp. 331, 371-391, in the text.

the hopes and consolations known to the poet of the Homeric hymn, and to Pindar, and many who, in later days, occupied themselves with the meaning of the Mysteries. Happy, whosoever of mortal men has looked on these things, but whoso hath had no part nor lot in this sacrament, hath no equal fate, when once he hath perished, and passed within the pall of darkness.'2 Of such rites we may believe that Plato was thinking, when he spoke of 'beholding apparitions innocent and simple, and calm and happy, as in a Mystery.' 3 Nor is it strange that, when Greeks were seeking for a sign, and especially for some creed that might resist the new worship of Christ, Plutarch and the Neo-Platonic philosophers tried to cling to the promise of the Mysteries of Demeter. They regarded her secret things as a dreamy shadow of that spectacle and that rite,' the spectacle and rite of the harmonious order of the universe, some time to be revealed to the souls of the blessed. It may have been no drawback to the consolations of the hidden services, that they made no appeal to the weary and wandering reason of the later heathens. Tired out with endless discourse on fate and free will, gods and demons, allegory and explanation, they could repose on mere spectacles and ceremonies, and pious ejaculations, without any evidence or proof offered for the statements.' Indeed, writers like Plutarch show almost the temper of Pascal, trying to secure rest for their souls by a wise passiveness and pious contemplation, and participation in sacraments not understood.

Such, then, was the refined, religious, and purely Hellenic aspect of Demeter and her myth. All is summed up in the face and attitude of the statue discovered at Cnidos. But this statue was not Mr. Newton's only trouvaille in the neighbourhood of the Temple Court. If his Demeter personified the noblest things in Greek religion, he also unearthed relics of the opposite element in Greek faith, the magical, fetichistic, and properly speaking savage element. He discovered one of the sacred subterranean chambers which Greek ritual language called μέγαρα, or βόθροι pits or crypts which were peculiar to the rites of the Chthonian or subterranean deities.5

The crypt opened by Mr. Newton was originally circular in form, but had been compressed, probably by an earthquake. Among the contents were certain small figures of pigs, in marble, and, at the very bottom, the bones of swine, and of some other animals.

Now what was the connection between Demeter and these porcine images, and remains of dead swine? To answer this question is to present, in a single example, the two extremes of Greek polytheism,

2 Homeric Hymn, v. 480–482.

Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum, xxii.

3 Phædrus, 250.

• There is a great deal of learning about these crypts: the student may refer to Lobeck's Aglaophanus, p. 828, to Mr. Newton's Halicarnassus, p. 391, note e, to Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum, to the Scholiast on Lucian's second Dialogue of Courtesans, in Preller's Mythologie, under 'Demeter,' and to Pausanias, ix. 1.

the rational, natural, and beautiful element, as personified in the statue of the desolate mother-the mourning Demeter-and the irrational, magical, and savage element, as represented by the pigs, and by their share in the rites and mysteries. This is that element in Greek faith which must be illustrated by magical practices and peculiarities of ritual that exist or are known to have existed among barbarous nations remote from Europe, and ignorant of Greece.

It has not escaped mythologists like Maury, in France, nor anthropologists like Mr. Tylor, that the worship of the Earth-Mother (as the name of Demeter means) is not peculiar to Greece, nor to the Aryan race. In America, as in old Germany, and by the Gipsies, and in America among Pawnees and Shawnees, as also in Greece, the Earth-Mother's sacrifices were buried in the earth, or cast down into natural crevices or artificial crypts. Tanner, the white man who was captured by Indians, and who lived with them from childhood, mentions how an Indian disturbing with his foot a pile of dry leaves, found buried under it a brass kettle, inverted, and containing a quantity of valuable offerings to the Earth. The earth is called Mother-Earth (Me-suk-kum-mik-O-kwi), and Indians, when they dig up medicine roots, 'deposit something as an offering to her.'s Without lingering over the Earth-Mother of Mexico, of Peru, or of the Tongan Islands, let us follow up this rite of burying offerings to Demeter. To study all the savage parallels to the Greek cult would occupy too much space. But it may be noted, in passing, that the priest of Demeter, in Arcadia, smote the earth with rods,' when at her yearly feast he summoned the Earth Goddess, and called on those below the earth.' The Zulu diviners also bid people who consult them 'smite the ground with rods for the spirits.'"

Let us now examine more closely the ritual of Demeter, and ascertain the part played in it by the pig. Among the feasts of Demeter, only the Eleusinia were more famous and popular than the Thesmophoria, a festival common to many towns, but best known at Athens. The Thesmophoria were the rites of seed-time, practised in October, and especially attended by the women. As among the Red Indians (a fact familiar from Longfellow's Hiawatha), strange feminine mysteries were supposed to aid the fertility of the crops, and preserve them from blight. In the Attic and other Thesmophoria, there was a certain licentious element. Demeter of the Thesmophoria presided over human birth and fruitfulness; it was she who had introduced the couós, or rite of marriage.

οἱ μὲν ἔπειτα

Ασπάσιοι λέκτροιο παλαιοῦ θεσμὸν ἵκοντο,

Maury, Religions de la Grèce, i. 72.

Tanner's Narrative, 1830, p. 155.

Op. cit. p. 193. All this is confirmed by the Jesuit father, De Smet, in his Oregon Missions, p. 351. (New York, 1847.) Compare Tylor, Prim. Cult. ii. 273. • Pausanias, viii. xv.; Callaway, Izinyanga Zokubula, iii. 362. VOL. XXI.-No. 122.

PP