in Egypt, the Soudan, in Central Africa, on the Congo and the Niger, in Uganda and Charterland, in Chitral, Burmah, and China they raised the cry year after year of Imperial expansion and trade profits, new markets and the Union Jack.

The whole world followed the Bismarckian lead. Russia, from whom perhaps the famous Chancellor originally imported his great idea, had an irresistible destiny in that direction, as the largest, most populous, least civilized nation in Europe. Austria even added to all her difficulties by another big annexation in the Balkan peninsula. Italy, in spite of her bankruptcy and dynastic weakness, must needs clutch at a province on the Red Sea. France could not be left out, and must make the tricolour wave over part of Siam, Tonquin, Madagascar, the Niger, and at last the Nile. Japan, and even little Greece, took up the Imperial mania. And at last the United States forsook their settled rules and policy, and are starting an Empire across the ocean. All nations, all parties, all statesmen are poisoned with this new microbe that one of them has named megalomania, and Disraeli, Gladstone, Rosebery, Ferry, Crispi, and McKinley took lessons from the great inventor of civilization and progress as based on blood and iron.

And then Mammon would not be behind Moloch; but resolved to show that blood and iron meant good business as well as glory. Gigantic speculations were started in all parts of the planet, railroads across whole continents, mines which produced the income and wielded the resources of an average State, plantations and settlements as big as many a great kingdom. And all these were put upon a footing that was half industrial and half military-like an ocean liner constructed to be used as an armed cruiser. Trade and business, war and conquest, were mixed up in equal shares. Under some charter or other guarantee of complicity from the State, the adventurers issued forth to fill their pockets, to beat down rivals, and extend the Empire in a kind of nondescript enterprise, which was partly commercial, partly imperial, partly buccaneering, but wholly immoral and perilous to peace. It was somewhat

like those piratical enterprises under Drake and Raleigh, in the days of Elizabeth, when the Queen and her courtiers took shares in buccaneering adventures to plunder the people of Spain without declaring war.

The opening of the vast continent of Africa by missionaries, hunters, and prospectors set all Europe on fire much as the discovery of the wealth of the West Indies and South America led to the wild scramble for transatlantic empires in the age of Elizabeth. European nations rushed in to fight for the spoil and enslave the natives. And, as usual, our own people secured the lion's share of the loot with abundant jealousy and hatred from their distant competitors. Ruby mines, diamond mines, gold mines, ivory, rubber, oil, or cotton served from time to time to attract investors and to float gigantic adventures. As if the very spirit of evil had been commissioned to tempt our generation, like as Job was tempted in the poem, the era of this saturnalia of blood and iron in Europe was the moment when enormous discoveries of precious stones and metals were revealed to the gloating eyes of avarice and ambition. The pair fell upon the mines like furies, the one shouting out Gold, the other Empire, and aroused a national delirium for wealth and dominion. Already the spirit of Evil seems to have begun his work of slaughter and loss, as when Job in his distress cried out, "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away." But are we so sure that death and loss will be made good to us in the end as amply as it was made good to Job?

The various events all coincided within the last quarter of the century now about to end. If we needed a date for this great change in our national and industrial life I would take as a symbol the proclamation of the Queen as Empress of India. It was a mere form, without direct effect in itself. But it served as the baptism of the new Imperialism. The British flag henceforth represented an Empire of conquest and annexation, on the lines of that Russian Empire which, in the middle of the century, Europe had combined to check and hum

ble. The Imperial title was a bauble in itself; but it symbolized the ambition of the men who arranged it. Cyprus was seized out of mere bravado. On the Imperial banner was inscribed the famous motto, Peace with Honour; on the obverse of which scroll was deeply graven, War with Disgrace. And the vulgar thing with a vulgar name, which is the new religion of the Imperialist, was bred in a cockney music-hall. The Transvaal was annexed by a snatch decree; the Zulu war followed; then the Afghan war and the "Forward" policy of our ardent proconsuls and the Young India party. Governments and parties changed; but not the policy. Egypt was seized; and in eighteen years it has cost us no less than six campaigns. Burmah was conquered and annexed. The rush to the diamond mines is hardly thirty years old; the rush to the gold mines about half of thirty; the Charterland is not ten years old, and it has led to two or three wars, including the Raid.

Analyze its degrading effects on the mind and temper of the nation. Compare the early and middle of the reign of the Queen with the last two or three decades. Who will dare to say that its close can compare with its promise and its maturity-in poetry, in romance, in literature, in philosophy, or in science? Allow what we will for the personal equation whereby the elder naturally looks back to the memories of the temporis acti; grant all the tendency we have to be slow to recognize latent genius in the budding, still it would be dishonest to claim for recent years an intellect as powerful and as solid as that which we knew in the middle of the reign. I insist on no particular writer, I rely on no special school. Names will occur to all-Dr. Arnold and his son, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Macaulay, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Disraeli, Hallam, Milman, Freeman, Froude, Ruskin, the Brontes, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trollope. All the work, or all the best and permanent work, of these was completed and had passed into the fabric of English literature before the Imperialist era began some twenty-five years ago. Have their successors quite equalled them?

It is the same story in more abstract things-in philosophy. in sociology, even in pure science, the special pursuit of our age. Charles Darwin, Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Professor Owen, Thomas Huxley, John Henry Newman, Pusey, Keble, Grote, Whewell, Kelvin, Lyell, Thirlwall, Buckle, Wilberforce, Jowett, Maurice, Bagehot, Martineau. Three or four out of the forty names I have mentioned survive in extreme old age; but even of these their principal work was completed at the date now taken. I do not deny that many men of high distinction are living and working still, and that there are still with us men of great promise, of whom much is expected. But taking, as a test, influence upon the age and European reputation, the last quarter of the present century cannot compare in its intellectual product with the three earlier quarters of this century. Name for name, the intellectual leaders of our present day cannot be named with those that went before them, either in poetry, or in romance, or in literature, or in science, or in philosophy, or in ethics, or in religion.

It would be futile, of course, to admit the current nonsense about "decadence ", or "the end of the century"; for the tone of a nation does not degenerate of its own motion, nor by the date of the calendar. It has a cause, and the cause is plain. No! When Imperialism set in about a quarter of a century ago, we all took to a much more practical, combative, and materialist view of life. We were told to get rich, to fight, to win the game, and the game was something solid and substantial. To be weak was to be miserable, as Satan told the rebel angels; to be poor was to be a failure; to make no conquests, no prizes, no fortunes, was to own oneself a poor thing. Competition ruled everything-education, sport, industry and literature. To win prizes we had to be up-to-date, and we grew year by year more up-to-date. We fell more and more under the rule of the newspaper press; and the press grew more and more noisy, braggart, bustling and smart. It got so furiously up-to-date that it even announced events before they had happened, and smashed books before they had been read. We

all had to live in a perpetual rattle which was something like a fair or a race-course, and something like an army of volunteers on a bank-holiday. The reveries of the imagination became less easy, and fell out of fashion. The pace was killing. Stories became shorter and shorter, as no one had time for a long book. The "boss", the "gold-bug", the "syndicate" were terms imported across the seas, and with the terms came the things. The press fell into the hands of the "bosses ", then "society" fell; and soon the State itself began to be run by the millionaires much as if it were a railway or a trust in the United States.

All this combined to materialize, to degrade the national life. It is not so much that we have glaring examples of folly, vice, extravagance, brutality, and lust. There are such examples in most ages, and they may be personal, independent of any general cause. The gloomy feature of our time is the wide diffusion of these evils amongst all classes and, what is far worse, the universal dying down of high standards of life, of generous ideals, of healthy tastes-the recrudescence of coarse, covetous, arrogant, and braggart passions. We who live quiet lives far apart from what calls itself the great world have no direct experience of these things; but we cannot resist the common testimony of those who know that during the reign of the Queen, wanton extravagances in dress, in living, in gaieties, have never been so crazy as now, with such sordid devices to scrape together the means for extravagance, such open sale of rank and person by those who claim to lead society and to dictate taste.

In such a world it is inevitable that the intellectual and æsthetic aims should become gross and materialized. The drama runs not merely to vice, but to morbid, sneaking forms of vice, to unwholesome melodrama, to a world of smart harlots and titled debauchees. The least vicious, the most vulgar, symptom of this decadence, is the prevalent fondness of men and women of fashion for the slang of the gutter and the slum. Popular novels, songs, and plays are composed in the jargon current amongst costermongers and thieves. Romance tends