better give up his proposed visit to India altogether and leave Lord Hardinge to welcome great Hindu princes to dinner to the appropriate strains of "The Roast Beef of Old England." The Navy Estimates. Ministers, I am glad to say, are standing to their guns, and there is no truckling to the well-meaning but most unwise advocates of a reduced Navy. It is a hideous and horrible thing to spend £44,000,000 a year over the Navy, but the increase is none of our choosing. Twice in the last six years we slacked off in order to convince the Germans of our anxiety to abandon the cut-throat competition in naval construction, and twice the Germans replied by increasing the number of Dreadnoughts laid down every year. We make no complaint. The Germans have a right to lay down as many ships as they please; but for us it is a matter of life and death to lay down two to their one. Ministers have erred in building too few ships rather than in building too many. Of course, if we are played out and cannot keep up the race any longer, then we must throw up the sponge and sink into the position of dependence upon the Power which is rich enough to pay both for a paramount army and a paramount navy. But despite Mr. Hirst of the Economist, the Macdonalds, and the ostrich party in the House of Commons, this country is not yet prepared to haul down the White Ensign and run up the White Flag. No, not even if we have to raise £100,000,000 a year to keep the Union Jack supreme on the seas! Paupers and Old-age pensions have this year been swollen by an addition of Old-Age Pensions. £2,600,000, owing to the fact that 7,529 indoor paupers and 143,000 outdoor paupers have preferred a pension to poor law relief. As they get 5s. a week instead of 3s. 7d. in England, 3s. 2d. in Scotland, and 2s. 2d. in Ireland, it is not surprising that 143,000 recipients of outdoor relief preferred to change their status. The indoor paupers cost the rates 10s. a week in Great Britain and 9s. 6d. in Ireland. Comparatively few forsook the workhouse. The net saving to the rates is estimated at £1,500,000, but as the taxpayer is saddled with an extra £2,600,000, the net increase in payments to the septuagenarian poor is over a million a year. Old-age pensions now cost the Exchequer £12,415,000 a year. past by a severe attack of peritonitis. His convalescence will be watched with sympathetic interest, not merely by his fellow members, but by all who have learned to appreciate the high spirit of conscientiousness with which Mr. Barnes has ever been faithful to his somewhat austere ideal of public duty. There is no disposition on the part of the British Government Baghdad Railway. to play the part of dog-in-themanger about the Baghdad Rail way. The If the Germans can build that line with their own money, or with money raised in the money markets of the world, by all means let them build it; and let them run it into Persia, if they like, and even to the Persian Gulf. But is it quite fair to insist that in order to enable them to build a line which some of them frankly admit is aimed directly at British influence in those regions, we should be asked to assent to the imposition of an increase of 4 per cent. ad valorem duty on all British imports into Turkey? The advantages to trade are hardly discernible if we have to pay £4 extra duty plus railway rates to carry a hundred pounds worth of goods, which we can now deliver in the same district for 50s. Critical Situation in the Near East. The Young Turks, of whom Mr. Noel Buxton speaks so highly in the Nineteenth Century, have prolonged martial law or the state of siege, as they call it, for the naive reason, frankly confessed, that without martial law they could not control the coming elections. This means, of course, the prolongation of the present régime of boycott against Greece, terrorism in Macedonia, rebellion in Arabia, and aggression in Persia. At Athens the situation is very serious. M. Venizelos is still at the helm of the ship of State, but there are few upon whom he can depend, and he does not always know where these few are to be found. The new Parliament, although nominally filled with his supporters, seems to be hardly more trustworthy than its predecessor. The astute professionals who pull the wires calculate upon using up M. Venizelos in order to leave the field clear for their own return to office. It is part of the rules of this sorry game to manœuvre your rival into doing what he most dislikes having to do, and then to taunt him with having done it. It is to be hoped, however, that the breach between. M. Venizelos and the leaders of the Labour Party is but a lovers' quarrel. M. Drakoulis is, no doubt, as Mr. Balfour once said about himself, a child in dealing with some questions. But he is a thoroughly honest man, a high-souled idealist who has imbibed English ideas of practical politics. He has faced much opprobrium by his support of M. Venizelos, and it would be a misfortune for Greece if any misunderstanding drove M. Drakoulis and M. Venizelos into opposite camps. The Resurgam of M. Briand. "I fall to rise again" probably summarises M. Briand's reflection upon the termination of the recent Ministerial crisis. He still had a majority in the Chamber of sixteen, but it was about as reliable as a majority for Mr. Asquith in the House of Commons if all the Nationalists, the Labour men, and half the Liberals composed the minority. So M. Briand, instead of waiting to be dismissed, resigned office and made way for a Monis Ministry which appears to outsiders to be a Delcassé Ministry in all but in name. M. Briand is a strong man who thought he was strong enough to hold out the olive branch of a policy of apaisement to the Clericals. He was strong enough to crush the railway strike, and gained so much prestige by doing it that his enemies declared he had fomented the strike in order to profit by its suppression. But he was not strong enough to command the support of his Radical followers for what they considered a weakening of the Anti-Clerical campaign, which they regard as essential to the safety of the Republic. So they gradually fell away from him, until at last M. Briand saw the only dignified thing to do was to kill the cow to save its life, and retire from an office to which he hopes to return, if indeed he does not aspire to that still more exalted post to which the clairvoyants of Paris have already designated him. The One of the oldest and most valued of my Helpers, Mr. H. A. Imperial Secretariat. Bannard, who has made the subject of the organisation of the Empire an object of special study, has reprinted in a small pamphlet the articles which he contributed to the British Empire Review in 1909 and 1910 on the Imperial Secretariat. Mr. Bannard desired to make the Imperial Secretariat "not merely a department of the Colonial Office, but an independent body representing each of the Dominions and the Mother Country, responsible to each and all, and paid for by all." On submitting his scheme to the delegates of the Imperial Defence Conference in 1909, the Canadian delegate condemned the proposal as impracticable "because you cannot have a body of the kind you suggest without responsibility to some authority in particular, and if it is organised and does its work in conjunction with the Colonial Office, it seems to me of necessity it must be responsible to the head of that office." The Australian delegate feared that " until the various Dominions could be represented upon some joint body of a representative character and charged with administrative powers and functions, I am afraid the Secretariat, though nominally responsible to all, would in fact and in practice be responsible to none in the sense in which responsibility would be desirable." Nothing daunted, Mr. Bannard proposed to make the Imperial Secretariat a miniature Imperial Council consisting of sixteen members, only two of which should represent the Home Government. The dominions-New Zealand, Newfoundland, India-should also send two each, while the remaining two should represent the Crown Colonies. As New Zealand has raised the question of the Secretariat in its suggested programme, and as South Africa proposes to make the Secretariat directly responsible to the Prime Minister, Mr. Bannard will have the satisfaction of looking forward to an interesting discussion when the Conference meets. Esperanto Royal Patronage. Esperanto as a universal key language for the nations of the civilised world is making slow and steady progress, and I think the fact that the Duke of Connaught has graciously undertaken to be patron of the meeting of the be held in Esperanto Society, which is to London on the 17th of this month, under the presidency of the Lord Mayor, may be regarded as a landmark in the progress of the movement. Hardly less significant is the intimation that has been published by M. Bernard, the sportsman novelist of France, to the effect that in future he intends to translate all his French works into Esperanto for himself. He says that Esperanto is so terse, vigorous, and lucid that he will insist on all foreign translations of his books being made from his Esperanto version rather than from the original French. |