ON THE BLACK LIST. ROMAIN ROLLAND has found an enthusiastic admirer in Ellen Key, who contributes an article on "The Neutrality of Souls" to the Friedens-Warte, of August-September. Rolland, she writes, towers like a brilliant Alpine peak above all the other intellectuals of Europe. In his own country he was hated because he himself would not hate, and despised because he himself would not despise. But he is no longer in a minority of one, for persecution has brought him friends, defenders, and followers, all working for the restoration of intellectual sanity. Rolland declines to condemn the whole German nation on account of the faults of its rulers, as he declines to give up the German friends who in the midst of the slaughter of nations have remained true to themselves. During the war he has raised himself to his present position, a height in which pity for all sufferers in the war cools hatred and in which pure air strengthens the neutrality of the soul. That does not preclude indignation against the German war-lords, whom he has condemned in the strongest terms. In Germany, as well as in France, he is on the black list. He is one of those writers who are now as greatly despised as they were once praised; he is despised by the Germans because he cannot understand "their righteous wrath," "their just cause, their undisputed right " to all their deeds. Such an honourable neutrality means intense loneliness. But this loneliness is by no means tragic. It places him so high above the battlefield that he can see the weaknesses everywhere and say the truth to all sides. To his countrymen he can say they have not only their frontiers but their soul to defend. To all the belligerents he says Imperialism must be resisted, although for the moment the German is the most immediate danger because the doctrine that might is right has been made the theoretical basis of political action. In 1903. Home Rule the Basis of Empire. The more Imperially we think-always in the British sense-the more irresistibly we shall be driven to include Ireland in the scope of our Imperial thoughts. Mr. Rhodes, from whose table Mr. Chamberlain has picked up some soiled crumbs, was quick to see that Imperialism and Unionism were antagonistic terms. Home Rule was to that thinker in continents a necessary postulate of the continued existence of the Empire. We cannot for ever carry on a system based upon government by assent side by side with a system which renders it absolutely impossible for eighty members of the Imperial Legislature to think Imperially excepting for the purpose of discovering some way in which they can weaken or dismember the Empire. Hence, the more Imperially we think, the more infallibly shall we come to the conclusion that the same principle which has secured the loyalty of Canada and of Australia must also be applied nearer home if we wish to secure the loyalty of Ireland and the Irish. But the worst of our pseudo-Imperialists, whether Liberals or Tories, is that whenever they touch upon Ireland their one aspiration is to have a majority in the House of Commons independent of the Irish vote-which is to say, in other words, that in dealing with Irish affairs they wish not to be compelled to think Imperially, but to be free to legislate and govern from an exclusively insular and British standpoint. From " Progress of the World," in "The Review of Reviews," Feb. 1904. William J. Stead |