built structures that spring up like a mushroom overnight can seldom be guaranteed a long life. The Return of the The Duke of Connaught, having done a straightforward, useful piece Duke of Connaught, of work in South Africa in the straightforward fashion natural to a member of his family, returned to England just too late to spend Christmas Day with the King. How long will it be, I wonder, before the Duke of Connaught will return from doing a similar bit of Empire-building work in the country from one of whose provinces he takes his title? How completely. the policy of Home Rule and conciliation has succeeded in South Africa has been remarkably attested by a speech delivered by President Steyn at the unveiling of a war memorial erected to commemorate the burghers who fell in the war with Great Britain. Mr. Steyn, who was the real hero of the war of the Republics, made an earnest appeal to his countrymen to strengthen their military organisation and to give no quarter to the "fiendish attempt" to create a racial feud over the educational question, because it Photograph by] Illustrations Bureau. The Return of Lord and Lady Minto. Lord and Lady Minto and their eldest daughter were photographed at Calais, where they were received on arrival by the British Consul, seen in the photograph wearing Levee dress. is the Indian equivalent to penal servitude for life and the confiscation of his worldly possessions. The sentence, however, will not be carried into effect until the Hague Tribunal, over which M. Beernaert, the illustrious Belgian statesman, will preside, has decided the question as to whether he was legally arrested when he made his escape to French soil in the harbour of Marseilles. The Cunard Com The "Mauretania's" pany seem to have Christmas Trip. on their staff someone with a genius for picturesque and effective advertisement. By way of reminding the world how small it is growing and how great are the shipping, loading and unloading facilities at the command of the Cunard Company, they despatched their mammoth ocean greyhound, the Mauretania, to New York on December 10, with instructions to be back at Fishguard in twelve days. There was nothing in this to show the maximum speed at which the ship could cross the sea. She has often maintained average speed of twenty-six an knots both out and home. The special feature of this race against time was to demonstrate the speed with which her cargo could be taken out and a new cargo taken on. To unload and load 12,000 tons of coal, stores, baggage, water and mails involved the employment in continuous shifts of 3,000 men at an extra cost of 50 per cent. The Mauretania took out 400 saloon, 220 second-class, and 560 third-class passengers. She was expected to bring passengers and mails back in time for delivery at their destinations in Great Britain and on the Continent before Christmas. She was an hour or two over her contract time, but the task was accomplished without difficulty in the teeth of a heavy gale which sheathed the ship in ice. It was a splendid advertisement, which has set Mr. H. G. Wells a-moralising over the rapid evolution of a delocalised class of humans whose advent is likely to make no little trouble, political and otherwise, before they adjust themselves to the established laws and customs of the stay-at-home community. This, of course; is as it should be. The same fond expectation prevailed among the followers of Joanna Southcote and of Prophet Wroe. That Mrs. Eddy will appear as a materialised spirit at one of the séances which she denounced so freely during her mortal life is tolerably certain. But this, of course, is not what the Church of Christian Science expects; it is, indeed, the last thing they would like to recognise as having happened. What they want is not so much. the risen spirit as the empty tomb. For a Canadian Navy. Canada is to have a real navy for defence purposes. The propositions of Sir Wilfrid Laurier for national defence and for the Dominion's share in the Imperial army and navy establishment, most of which have already received Parliamentary support, contemplate the organisation of a Canadian militia and the building of a Canadian navy, "subject to the call of the British Admiralty, provided always that within fifteen days the Dominion Parliament ratifies the call." One Canadian cruiser, the Niobe, has already been completed and is now in service. Early in November the beginnings of Canada's independent naval establishment were signalised by the departure from Esquimalt of the representatives of the British Admiralty. With the transfer to the Dominion authorities of this naval station and dockyard, on the Pacific Coast, there disappears from the mainland of the North American continent the last outpost of British Imperial power. THE The Real Leader of the Unionists. Mr. J. L. GARVIN, Editor of the "Observer." HE world often knows the least of its greatest men. Of the dispirited and defeated millions who flocked to the polling booths last month how many hundreds, I wonder, had the least suspicion of the fact that they were practically but dumb driven cattle who were being marched backwards and forwards in obedience to the dominating will of a man of whose very existence they were altogether unaware. A delusion prevails in some quarters that the policy of the Unionist Party is directed by those who are conventionally described as its leaders-a term which is still ironically applied to Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Balfour. For some time past, however, an uneasy conviction has been penetrating the minds of the country gentlemen that Mr. Balfour is little more than a puppet whose wires are pulled from Birmingham. Mr. Chamberlain, in his sick chamber, has been suspected as the man behind the throne. Mr. Chamberlain, no doubt, has to be reckoned with, but he is by no means the supreme hero of the Constitu tional crisis. His sun had begun to set when that of his successor began to rise. It is difficult to conceive a prouder position of anonymous eminence than that which has been reached by the able Irish journalist who has for the last eighteen months relieved the Conservative chiefs of the responsibility and labours of political leadership. When he contemplates the serried ranks of the Unionist army, Mr. Garvin may adopt as his own the familiar words of Alexander Selkirk on his solitary isle, who declared "I am monarch of all I survey, my right there is none to dispute; from the centre all round to the sea, I am lord . . .' But if this is the attitude with which he is regarded by his submissive thralls, the attitude of the Liberal Party is even more calculated to fill his heart with pride. For while one party obeys him, the other regards him with the profoundest emotions of respect. For he has done for them what they never could have done for themselves. The full extent of their debt to Mr. Garvin is not yet realised; so in this article I endeavour to render my small meed of praise to my distinguished confrère. It is indeed as if a new Disraeli had been discovered by the Tories in the hour of their sorest need. Like Disraeli, Mr. Garvin is not of English stock, although born in Hull in 1868 and brought up on Tyneside. Both had the advantage or disadvantage of being aliens in a Commonwealth whose destinies they were afterwards fated to direct. When Mr. Alfred Spender, the present editor of the Westminster Gazette, was a young man of threeand-twenty he became the editor of the Eastern Morning News of Hull. Some years before, I had become editor of the Northern Echo at Darlington at the age of twenty-two, and Mr. Spender's experiences at Hull, his reforming zeal, and the energy with which he used his editorial pen for the reformation of the community, curiously reminds me of my own experiences further North. I also resembled Mr. Spender in having the assistance of a brother on the editorial staff, but I was less favoured than he in one particular. Mr. Spender had an outside contributor whom he had never seen, but whose articles were both long and interesting. He published them all, and wrote to their author asking him to come round and see the editor, but the contributor never responded to the invitation. All that Mr. Spender knew was that the contributions came from a correspondent signing himself J. L. Garvin. Thirteen years later they met in London, when for the first time Mr. Garvin revealed his personality. "Why did you not come and see me?" said Mr. Spender. "Because if I had done so," was the reply, "you would never have accepted another article from me. At the time when I sent those articles in I was a boy of seventeen years of age." So precocious was the man who for the last twelve months in his maturity has held the reins of power in the Conservative Party. HIS DÉBUT AT NEWCASTLE. Mr. Garvin made his debut in North-country politics as a fervent Irish Nationalist. In those days he employed his ready pen by acting as correspondent for United Ireland, which was then in its palmy days. Possibly he acquired that fullblooded vigour of style which has made him so irresistible a leader of the Tory democracy by the exercises of these early days. At the onset he was even more friendless than Disraeli. For Disraeli's father was a well-known man of letters, who was able to introduce his son to the great ones of the world. Mr. Garvin had no such advantages. The only great man whose acquaintance he made was Joseph Cowen, of the Newcastle Chronicle, and the influence of his somewhat pugilistic eloquence can still be traced in Mr. Garvin's writings. His journalistic work in Newcastle him plenty gave of practice in the art of leader-writing. He assimilated Mr. Cowen's style and acquired from him also the habit of intellectual detachment from party ties. Nominally a Radical, Mr. Cowen was always a frondeur. He was a thorn in the flesh of the Liberals. He never forgave Gladstone; he always had a sneaking fondness for Beaconsfield, and he was a hierophant of Jingoism. He sympathised with the Irish, and Mr. Garvin found little difficulty in accommodating himself to the atmosphere of the Newcastle Chronicle. WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. When T. P. O'Connor was starting M.A.P. he advertised for an assistant editor. From a multitude of applications he selected Mr. Tracy and Mr. Garvin. He was much attracted by Mr. Garvin's letter, and offered him the situation. But on consideration Mr. Garvin decided that he was too much bound to Mr. Joseph Cowen to desert him for a London post. If he had decided otherwise, how different might have been Mr. Garvin's meteoric career! HIS FENIAN DAYS. It was probably before his Chronicle novitiate that he wrote for United Ireland. The Irish World bears bitter grudge against him on account of these early writings. It calls him the Irish Benedict Arnold and brands him as an apostate. But Mr. Garvin's own explanation of his change of front is simple. He quitted his Fenian comrades when he found that they hated England more than they loved Ireland, and under the tutelage of Mr. Joseph Cowen he developed into a fervent Imperialist. He was an immense worker, a facile writer, and a man, to quote the old Carlylean phrase," with enough fire in his belly to burn" up the whole Conservative world. HIS SKETCH OF PARNELL. It was not till the year 1898 that I became aware of his existence. In that year I find that I record in the REVIEW OF REVIEWS that Mr. Louis Garvin had contributed a very brilliant paper to the Fortnightly Review on " Parnell and His Power." He declared that Mr. Parnell was "the most typical representative of the English-speaking world that has yet been seen." Mr. Garvin then in the following sentences epitomised Mr. Parnell's career, which, as we read them, seem to suggest that Mr. Garvin may yet rival Mr. Parnell in the sensational nature of his achievements: We know what he did. He was thirty when he began, and he died at forty-five. He disorganised the House of Commons; reversed the traditional relations of the races by making Englishmen furious while he remained calm; wrested all constitutional forms to revolutionary ends; made Ireland ungovernable except by himself; extorted more valuable concessions for Ireland ungovernable than Ireland submissive would ever have received; paralysed the great Liberal majority of 1880; overthrew Mr. Gladstone's Government; put Lord Salisbury and the Conservatives into power, and persuaded the Constitutional party to hold remarkably civil language towards treasonable agitators; threw the Irish vote in Great Britain for the first time against the Liberal Party; attained the balance of power at a General Election-was for a moment the Warwick of the Empire; forced Mr. Gladstone to capitulate; placed Mr. Gladstone again in power; saw a Bill that would have made him autocrat of Ireland rejected by a majority of thirty only in the House of Commons; drove the most respectable of great journals to the exotic course of attacking him on charges of condoning assassination by facsimiles of letters that were forged; defeated the Times in the last and most dramatic of his victories-only to be ruined by the divorce case, as completely as was Queen Mary by the Casket Letters. HIS ARRIVAL IN LONDON. When he came to London Mr. Garvin worked on the Daily Telegraph, and afterwards became editor of the Outlook. But it was not until he blossomed out as editor-in-chief of the Observer that he found his foot on the steps of his future throne. There is no journalist but must regard with profound admiration and sympathy the exploits of their Irish confrère, who, emerging from his Nationalist chrysalis, has dominated so speedily the Imperialist Party. It little dreamed when it took him into its service that it was creating its dictator. THE REIGN OF KING GARVIN. "But," it will be asked impatiently by those who are outside the inner circle of English politics, "what proof is there that this man Garvin, or whatever you say his name is, holds such a position? We never see the Observer. What proof is there that this editor holds the extraordinary position that you ascribe to him?" To answer that question fully would necessitate writing the history of the last eighteen months. As this is impossible here, suffice it to state first that in the course of the last eighteen months the House of Lords and the Unionist Party, of which it is the mere instrument and appanage, have embarked upon a series of adventures from which even the bold spirit of Lord Beaconsfield would have recoiled, and which would have been repudiated as unthinkable by Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne the year before Mr. Garvin arrived upon the scene. The first and decisive assertion of the dictatorship of Mr. Garvin was the rejection of the Budget. He discerned the latent peril of unlimited tacking and sounded the alarm. If there had been no Observer, or if Mr. Garvin had been other than the great man that he is, the Budget would have been accepted by the Lords, and the Liberal Party might have at this moment been going into Opposition for a period of six years, the inevitable result of a dissolution which the Lords would have forced upon the country, not upon the Budget, but upon the question of Welsh Disestablishment. For the Lords to reject a Budget was a thing unheard of and without precedent in the history of England. But to adventurers like Mr. Garvin the more impossible the task the more imperiously he insists that it must be accomplished. FIRST UKASE: REJECT THE BUDGET! So, sitting on his editorial throne, he belaboured the Peers with his sceptre so unmercifully that at last he aroused within the most timorous the conviction that the time had come when they must put their fortune to the touch to win or lose it all. With grim complacency Mr. Lloyd George watched the campaign of his redoubtable fellow Celt, and from time to time came to his assistance with a Limehouse or a Newcastle speech when there seemed a chance that the task of rousing the Peers to opposition would exceed even Mr. Garvin's strength. What Mr. Garvin single-handed could not accomplish, Mr. Garvin and Mr. Lloyd George, acting in semiconscious concert, were able to effect. The Budget was lost, but the Liberal Party was saved. That was the first great achievement of Mr. Garvin, and for that we owe him endless gratitude. A WELL-EARNED MEED OF GRATITUDE. When the full significance of the final triumph of the people over the Peers is recorded no name will stand so conspicuously before the eyes of posterity as that of Mr. J. L. Garvin. All unconscious to himself, and while serving his Party with the utmost loyalty and devotion, Mr. Garvin nevertheless achieved, all unthinking, so great a victory for the cause of the people that we may apply to him the eloquent words which Tennyson used concerning another famous Irishman, the Duke of Wellington :And thro' the centuries let a people's voice In full acclaim, A people's voice, The proof and echo of all human fame, SECOND UKASE: THE TRUCE OF GOD. But this was not all. When Mr. Garvin terrified the House of Lords into making the last stand, and so precipitated a conflict which the nominal leaders of the Party regarded with alarm and dismay, he gave his thralls a taste of his quality. The death of the King gave him another opportunity of arraying himself in the robes of the Angel of Peace. He proclaimed in tones pontifical a Truce of God. On this occasion he was not content with merely exercising his imperious sway over his own Party: he addressed with equal confidence the leaders of the Liberals. There was something splendid in the sublimity and solemnity of the appeals which, in the name of our deceased Sovereign, he addressed to all parties of his subjects. If he did not exactly exhort us to convert our swords into plough-shares and spears into pruning-hooks, he insisted upon a cessation of hostilities along the whole battle front. And here again the great Irishman found in our little Welshman his most effective coadjutor. SALVATION LIES IN DEVOLUTION. The Conference of Eight was practically brought; into being by Mr. Garvin's influence. So long as it was in being he and his fellow Celt laboured-one secretly, the other publicly-for all that they were worth in order to crown the Truce of God by a |