ing that, should misfortune happen to the boaster, all his acquaintance have a secret feeling that he has brought his punishment on his own head, and got what he deserves. Only those friends are sorry for him who would not like to see him get his deserts in any circumstances. Unless affection forbids such a feeling, a certain sense of satisfaction takes possession of the spectator when the most innocent boaster is put to confusion by events. Foolhardiness undertaken for no possible good rouses annoyance, not sympathy. The boaster knew the common result of his action, the onlooker reflects. He was sure to suffer for his ill-judged words. Why did he not think of that before he spoke? Others have escaped because they were more wary. Some very sensitive people will reproach themselves even for an inward boast. They experience a passing shadow of foreboding, and instinctively regard any small happiness which may come to them immediately after as a grace of which they were just then specially unworthy.

Naturally we know, when we think seriously about the matter, that all this is nonsense,-that nobody brings upon himself any calamity by boasting of his immunity. The thing is unthinkable. The course of events cannot be changed by an idle speech, and even the least reverent would hesitate to ascribe petty or spiteful attributes to God Almighty. But the impulse to cry "Absit omen!" in some form or other is one which cannot be controlled by argument, and which no changes in creed or circumstance seem to affect.

The manners of the world reflect its inward conviction in this matter. By no code is the boaster held guiltless. His whole circle is in league to trip him up. In the East all appearance of boasting is avoided with a ludicrous scrupulosity. Even here we make use of moderately self-depreciatory for

mulas which, while they deceive no one, testify to the common sentiment. All the same, human nature must find an outlet. In some men the longing to boast, especially of their prowess or their possessions, is so persistent as to be irresistible. They know better than to do it directly, and their futile efforts to deceive Providence, their acquaintance, and themselves as to what they are doing when boast they must make excellent material for the satirist. The humblest among us will hardly be able to search his memory without admitting that he has been impelled to do it from time to time in such a manner as he hoped might elude the watchfulness of fate or his critical neighbors. There are so many ways of leading an interlocutor to infer the speaker's goodness, cleverness, presence of mind, or worldly prosperity without positively telling him about these advantages, and if the insinuation is sufficiently delicate, the boaster always hopes that his offence may be overlooked. The hunger for approbation is universal, and joy in possession is a joy which seldom exists except in company. All desire for secret possession-like that of the miser -savors of aberration. Half the delight of a gift in the mind of a child is the pleasure of showing it. If only we can succeed in persuading ourselves and our friends that it was not ostentation but simplicity which made us do it, we shall get real pleasure out of an occasional boast. But woe to the man who is detected! He is always rewarded with shame. One can imagine a hero who broke any one of the Ten Commandments, but not a hero who was accustomed to boast. The effect of the advantage he boasts of is instantly nullified by the fact of boasting, and very few critics have the insight to realize that ease of detection is often in inverse ratio to the heinousness of the offence.

How can one account for this strange

is difficult to say; but the fear of it is universal and so ineradicable that it must trace back to some fundamental principle of human progress. Does it offend in any way against the social instinct? We are inclined to think it does. It is no doubt an expression of individualism in its most offensive form. The man who boasts asserts his own superiority, whether he ascribes it to luck or wit, and separates himself, consciously or unconsciously, from his fellows. He does not assert the superiority which would rule, and therefore weld, or the separateness which is the inevitable outcome of exceptional gifts, but the superiority which springs from contempt and the separateness which tends to disintegration. It is a curious fact of human nature that humility draws forth from the world almost as much admiration as courage. As in the case of courage, it is almost impossible wholly to condemn a character in which we see it, and without it the greatest virtues leave us cold. If every good word which the Pharisee said of himself were proved true, we should still dislike him. We even dislike his modern and far less offensive descendant, the prig. A good man without humility serves to bring goodness into ridicule. All the truly lovable characters in fiction are embellished by it, and the fact that in its counterfeit form it is so keenly reThe Spectator.

sented is only one more proof of the esteem in which it is held. We are all furious when we have been imposed upon by an imitation of the irresistible. It may sound cynical, but there is only one quality which ensures love, and only one quality the absence of which precludes it, and that is forgiveableness, a quality which depends for the most part upon humility. The forces of moral criticism and righteous indignation are disarmed when they are brought into contact with it. The justification of the publican in the parable may be illogical,-it is inevitable. It is possible, too, that boasting may outrage something in the nature of man even higher than the social element. A sense of dependence upon invisible powers is one of the few things which, so far as we know, he does not share with the animals. Even if a man believes in nothing better than Nemesis, his outlook is wider than that of a person who believes in nothing but himself. He may rise to the spiritual heights of the great Greek tragedians, but self-sufficiency is a strong tether which keeps its victims tied altogether to earth. The man without any sense of spiritual dependence must remain for ever utterly commonplace. These explanations only very partially explain why the corporate conscience of the world regards boasting as symptomatic of moral disease, and instantly applies to it the cautery of fear. Where all creeds, ages, and countries are in agreement, it is perhaps better to give in than to reason.

Few documents have been published in our time of more poignant interest than the one which the Daily Telegraph was privileged to give to the world on Wednesday. We take its authenticity

for granted not only on the strength of the journal in whose columns it appeared, but because of the inherent credibility of its contents. We may not be sure that we are reading in

every line the Kaiser's ipsissima verba, but we may be quite sure that his opinions and emotions are here faithfully reproduced and that the statements attributed to him are substantially the statements he made. Taking the communication, therefore, at its face value, what does it amount to? Its chief purpose appears to be that of convincing the people of this country not only that the Kaiser is their friend but that it is one of his dearest wishes to live on the best of terms with them. The scepticism and mistrust with which his professions of good-will are received in Great Britain he takes as nothing less than a personal insult; and he is at a loss to understand why the British people should so completely have given themselves over "to suspicions unworthy of a great nation." Let us admit at once that there is much in what the Kaiser says under this head that cannot be well refuted. It is indeed open to anyone to reply that the German suspiciousness of British policy has taken far more extravagant forms than the British suspiciousness of German policy. That we hold to be the bare fact. But it is none the less the fact that for the past decade there has been much that was irrational and unjust in the attitude of certain British journals towards the Kaiser and the German Government, though never, so far as we know, towards the German people. On both sides of the North Sea the tendency to misinterpret, to impute motives, to look for hidden and sinister explanations has been flagrant and injurious; and though the worst excesses have been perpetrated in Berlin, we cannot deny that London has not been free from blame. The document published this week is a case in point. It has been widely commented on as an attempt to sow distrust between Great Britain, France and Russia. It is treated as a Machiavellian stroke of policy on the part of the Kaiser. VOL. XLI.

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there is not the smallest evidence to show that the Kaiser either prompted or approved its publication; its author explicity announces its appearance as a "calculated indiscretion" of his own; and all the probabilities of the case are against the theory that the Kaiser could be so ignorant of British opinion as to suppose that his revelations of what happened during the Boer war could affect the Triple Entente of today. Yet we do not doubt that to a great many people in England the "interview" will appear in the light of a premeditated bombshell hurled against the Anglo-Franco-Russian Entente.

Of this sort of thing there has been enough and more than enough. There is no reason for doubting that among the many movements of the Kaiser's mind friendship for England, sympathy with various aspects of English life, and admiration for some of England's achievements hold a not inconstant place. We do not mean that he has always spoken well of us; to a man of his temperament a uniform suavity is probably impossible. But that his personal inclinations as an individual make him well disposed towards us we see no reason for disputing. The Kaiser is fully entitled moreover to dwell upon the occasions when his benevolence passed beyond the amiabilities of after-dinner rhetoric and took shape in deeds. No one can question that he braved more than a little unpopularity among his own people when he refused to receive the Boer envoys, when he took part in Queen Victoria's funeral, and when he decorated Lord Roberts. It is true that self-interest coincided with good-will to produce these manifestations of regard. It is true that it was not until the Boer cause was palpably and irretrievably lost that the Kaiser gave any overt sign of his British sympathies. It is true also that a word from him might have dammed the flood of calumny that

poured over our troops, and might have modified very considerably the tone in which his responsible Ministers spoke of English policy. But for what he publicly did the Kaiser must in fairness be allowed some credit. We now learn that he was active in our cause in ways that neither his people nor our own suspected. He even went so far as to draw up a plan of campaign for our benefit, an amusingly officious venture that the Boers at any rate may be expected to relish. Moreover, he took the first opportunity of letting the British Government know that projects of intervention, suggested by Russia and seconded by France, had only conie to naught because of Germany's resolve to steer clear of any "complications with a sea-Power like England."

Now it is the fact that Russia proposed and that France was not unwilling to entertain a scheme for putting pressure on Great Britain to end the South African war. We can afford to forget it nowadays or to remember it without a trace of vindictiveness, merely as a relic of an unhappy period in our diplomatic history. But the reason why the scheme fell through was that Germany's co-operation in it was made conditional on a formal acquiescence by France in the permanent loss of Alsace-Lorraine. M. Delcassé thought the price too high and the conspirators disbanded. It was not from any kindly feeling towards us, but simply to serve the ends of her European policy that Germany put forward the stipulation which killed the project almost before it was born. The Kaiser was as willing to sacrifice England for the sake of Alsace-Lorraine as to sacrifice the Boers for the sake of placating

The Outlook.

England. It is here we touch the weak spot in the Imperial professions of friendship. They are personal to himself as a man and do not, except in minor matters of form and ceremony. affect his conduct or policy as German Emperor. The prevailing sentiment among large sections of the German lower and middle classes is, as he says, unfriendly to England; and no ruler can afford to separate himself for long from the dominant opinions of his subjects. If it were worth while we could easily show, and without the least intention of "insulting" the Kaiser, that the good services to England which he enumerates have been more than offset by things said and things done that wore anything but a friendly air. It is however not worth while, for the reason that the Anglo-German problem is essentially one of large and fundamental facts and is not to be changed, though it may be modified, by the private attitude and volition of this or that individual, however exalted. growth of the German navy, operating upon the Anglophobia of the bulk of the German masses, is the vital and enduring fact. No declarations of personal good-will, however sincere, can alter that fact or disguise its profound significance. It governs all British policy in Europe, and must long continue to govern it. The increase of sanity and perspective in our national attitude towards Germany, the abandonment of trivial and undignified suspicions, even the unreserved acknowledgment of the Kaiser's personal friendship for our country, only serve to emphasize the naval issue between the two nations as one that involves nothing less than a fight for life.

The