right, and the note of an inflexible purpose these were what men found in the words which an English writer described as being full of "stateliness and force." When the true meaning of the message dawned upon the British people, a wave of consternation swept over the country. Not because England shrank from war as war, but because the very thought of war with their own kindred affected Englishmen with a moral horror. "War with America is unthinkable!" was said again and again. Clergymen spoke from their pulpits of the criminality of such a thing. The newspapers declared it to be quite impossible. The man in the street, puzzled and confused, experienced a feeling of bewilderment. Then a most unprecedented incident occurred. On New Year's Day, 354 members of the House of Commons signed and sent to the President and to Congress a memorial asking that in the future all questions at issue between Great Britain and the United States be referred to arbitration. There was an amusing lack of logic shown in sending this memorial to the President and Congress, inasmuch as both had striven earnestly to have the Venezuelan question arbitrated. That it might better have been addressed to Lord Salisbury was fairly obvious. Yet the meaning of it was clear enough. It was indirectly a disclaimer of the Premier's action, and also an appeal for peace. In like manner an address was prepared and largely signed by British authors to their American brothers of the pen, deprecating the thought of war, and asking their influence in behalf of international good will.

Of course, not all Englishmen were anxious for an amicable settlement of the dispute. The jingo and the fire-eater were here and there in evidence. When the British authors were preparing their address, Mr. Morley Roberts wrote and published a very characteristic letter in which he voiced the secret thoughts of many Tories. Said he:

"No Englishman with imperial instincts can look with anything but contempt on the Monroe Doctrine. The English, and not the inhabitants of the United States, are the greatest power in the two Americas; and no dog of a

Republic can open its mouth to bark without our good leave. . . . Those who sign this precious paper go on to say that we are proud of the United States. Sir, we might be proud of them, but to say that we are proud of them is to speak most disingenuously. Who can be proud of a politically corrupt and financially rotten country, with no more than a poor minority vainly striving after health?"

And the Saturday Review, while declaring over and over again (as though to keep its courage up) that, of course, there would be no war, professed to think that if war came, the humiliation of the United States would be instantaneous and bitter. Discussing the military resources of the two nations, it declared: "America is now at a greater disadvantage, compared with Great Britain, than it was in 1812."*

As a purely academic question, it may be permitted to hazard a conjecture as to the probable course and issue of such a war as then seemed for a moment possible. President Cleveland's message, with its implied threat, has been often spoken of as a colossal "bluff;" and both then and afterwards men said that the United States must have yielded had the verge of war been actually reached. It is true that the national military establishment in 1896 was wretchedly inadequate for any war whatever, and most of all for a war with the greatest naval power in the world. For a number of years, the creation of a system of adequate coast-defences had been slowly going on; but as yet nothing had been completed. There existed only the nucleus of works which it would still take years to finish. When the President sent his bold message to Congress, there had been actually mounted only one highpower modern gun of really formidable calibre. So far as permanent defences and scientific fortifications were concerned, every city on the entire American seaboard was practically unprotected against the attack of a powerful fleet. Portland, Boston, New York, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah in the East and San Francisco in the West, together with a score of smaller cities invited capture by their weakness and their wealth. Many an English naval captain and many an Eng*Saturday Review, December 28, 1895.

lish soldier must have thought longingly of this enormous mass of riches, echoing, perhaps, old Blücher's exclamation, "Was für Plunder!"* Nor as yet had the new American navy reached a growth sufficient to make it a factor in the problem of defence. Not a single battleship had been completed, and the cruisers alone were neither numerous enough nor powerful enough to meet the armoured squadrons of Britain. These facts must have been carefully conned over in the British War Office during the last days of 1895. Perhaps there was a moment when those whose touch could turn the scale may have been tempted to let it incline to war, feeling, as an Englishman afterwards expressed it, that "We are likely to suffer in our self-respect, our sense of personal security, and in our pockets, until we have succeeded in convincing some nation of the first class that . . . we are ready for war."

But, on the other hand, there were some considerations which offset the apparent disparity of immediate resources. There can be no doubt that in the first months of such a war, the American seaboard would have suffered most severely. Some, at least, of the cities mentioned would have been laid under heavy contribution, and some would possibly have been shelled or burned. Yet the military experience of later years has shown that even improvised or hastily constructed means of defence may suffice to hold a fleet in check, and even to destroy a part of it. The torpedo, the floating mine, and all the other deadly implements of naval warfare would have been developed and used with terrible effect by a people so ingenious, so inventive, and so daring as the Americans; and these devices, supported by the heavily armoured, doubleturreted monitors (Terror, Puritan, Amphitrite, Miantonomoh, Monadnock and Monterey) would probably have saved New York, and no doubt other cities; for the fortune of war does not usually give all the successes to one side.

But granting that the British fleet might have dealt ruin and devastation

*See a characteristic chapter in Kipling's American Notes, on the American coast defences.

tWhittle, op. cit., pp. 227, 228.

to the whole Atlantic seaboard, this would have been only the beginning of the war. The vast interior of the country would have still remained untouched, its resolution unimpaired, its resources unexhausted. Meanwhile, the whole of Canada would have been overrun by American armies. It has been many times asserted and as many times denied that in the event of hostilities, the British troops in Canada, heavily re-enforced, were to have commenced a campaign which Sir Redvers Buller had been selected to direct. The subsequent career of this officer and his proved weakness and incompetence in South Africa give one a criterion to judge of what he would have done against enemies a hundred-fold more numerous than the Boers, and ten thousand-fold more able to sustain a long and wasting war. Indeed, ere a single troopship could have sailed from England, an army of half a million men would have swarmed across the Canadian frontier. The permanent conquest of all British America, with the flourishing cities of Victoria, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, St. Johns and Halifax, would have been a more than adequate compensation for the hasty plundering of a few American seaports. Moreover, the loss to Great Britain would have been tremendously augmented by the destruction of her commerce with the United States, by the paralysis of her shipping trade, which carries so large a share of American products, by the cutting off of her abundant food supplies, and, perhaps, by the confiscation of the hundreds of millions of British capital invested in American enterprises. Again, as the war went on, the American navy would have swiftly gained the power of taking the offensive. In navy yards inaccessible to attack, the battleships and formidable cruisers and torpedo-boats. already half completed would have been finished and new ones rapidly laid down, until at last a mighty fleet would have issued to give battle on the open seas; while swarms of commerce destroyers would have swept the ocean clean of British merchantmen. Already, in 1895, at the opening of the German ship-canal at Kiel, two of the new American cruis

ers, the New York and the Columbia, had won the instant notice of all the foreign naval experts. The Columbia, in particular, both for the strength of her armament and her extraordinary speed, was an object of curiosity and of some disquietude. Her speed was made apparent on her return voyage, when she made the passage from Southampton to New York under natural draught and in heavy weather, in six days and twenty-three hours, distancing the English-built liner St. Louis and the German-built liner Augusta Victoria. A score of cruisers such as the Columbia, able to escape from the more sluggish battleships, and fitted to destroy all smaller craft, would have put an end to ocean trade in British bottoms and ruined the great shipping interests of Glasgow, Liverpool, and London.

But there still remained another element which must have been seriously pondered by the British Cabinet. Lord Salisbury at this time may well have echoed Bismarck's saying after Sadowa, in 1866 "We are not living alone in Europe." Involved in a gigantic war with the United States, how would imperial Britain have safeguarded her prestige in other quarters of the globe? Germany stood ready to grasp eagerly at the sceptre of commercial supremacy. France would have extended her African possessions without the humiliation of a Fashoda. Russian armies could have occupied Constantinople or pushed back the frontiers of India. The Boers might have secured their independence without a blow, or, by setting forward the time. for their great struggle, have won it gloriously. Indeed, had England and the United States engaged in war, they would have taken quite unequal risks. Upon the latter, the contest must have inflicted great material losses. Its prosperity would have been crippled and its expansion checked for many a year; yet in the end, the Republic would have emerged with no impairment of its power or prestige. But to Great Britain, which had so many hostages to give to fortune, defeat would have spelled instant ruin; while even victory (if we concede that victory was possible) would have been purchased at a price of which no Englishman could think without a shudder.

Fortunately, so appalling a catastrophe was averted, never, perhaps, again to be so imminent. In the end, public feeling in Great Britain came to recognise that no strip of South American territory, even were it piled knee-deep with gold, was worth a war between the two great English-speaking peoples. The blame of the whole unfortunate imbroglio was very justly laid upon Lord Salisbury, for allowing what was in itself an unimportant question to drift into the magnitude of a casus belli. Yet the impasse still continued. However great the blunder which he had committed, the British Premier could scarcely cry "Peccavi" and ask the American President to forgive him. It was then that the way to peace was made smooth by the American Commission which Mr. Cleveland had promptly appointed on January 1st. This body, through Secretary Olney, asked the governments of Great Britain and Venezuela for such documentary evidence as would aid it in its investigation. In each case a most courteous assent was given. A month later,* Ambassador Bayard, in view of the marked public demonstrations in both England and the United States, proposed to Lord Salisbury that the Venezuelan question be discussed at Washington, with a view to ultimate arbitration. This was a decided proffer of the olive-branch, and Lord Salisbury responded five days. later in a note in which he cordially agreed to Mr. Bayard's suggestion, and concluded with this significant sentence:

"I have empowered Sir Julian Pauncefote to discuss the question either with the representative of Venezuela or with the Government of the United States acting as the friend of Venezuela."

This little sentence conceded the whole matter at issue. It recognised the United States as entitled to interfere on behalf of an American Republic as against a European power, and it tacitly withdrew the prior British declaration that such interference had no warrant in the law of nations. In other words, Great Britain accepted President Cleveland's new interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine as a

*February 27, 1896.

principle to be recognised thereafter in Anglo-American relations. Soon after, Lord Salisbury, not to be gracious by halves, withdrew his insistence upon the Schomburgk line, and agreed to submit the whole question to arbitration. A formal treaty to that effect was signed at Washington on February 2, 1897.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the profound impression which the Venezuelan affair produced upon the statesmen of Continental Europe,-an impression that was reflected in the press and in many monographs and special publications. The prestige of the United States was enhanced immensely, a fact of which Americans abroad were made

aware in many ways. Their country was now spoken of in a tone of grave respect that was altogether new. A thoughtful observer who had carefully studied the drift of European opinion, wrote that

"The best informed French and German journalists, though they acknowledge the equity and prudence of the compromise which has been reached, think it necessary to point out that it involves possibilities of considerable gravity, not merely to England and the United States but also to the civilised world in general."*

precedent which may in the future be quoted with great effect against herself, and she has greatly strengthened the hands of the United States Government in any dispute that may arise in the future between a South American Republic and a European power in which the United States may desire to intervene."*

In the United States, many and various were the opinions that were rife regarding President Cleveland's bold and somewhat startling course. Of the unfavourable criticisms uttered at the time, it will be necessary to speak hereafter. But perhaps the matured judgments of two able

men who were not of Mr. Cleveland's party may be cited as embodying the final verdict of his countrymen. Dr. Edward Stanwood, a close student of American political history and long an intimate friend of Mr. Blaine, sums up very briefly the outcome of the Venezuelan episode as "the most signal victory of American diplomacy in modern times."t And

Mr. John W. Foster, an experienced and sagacious diplomat, who succeeded Mr. Blaine as Secretary of State in President Harrison's Cabinet, gives his deliberate opinion in these words: "I regard the President's action as a consistent, judicious and necessary application of the true intent and spirit of the [Monroe] Doctrine."

But whatever opinion may be held regarding the wisdom of President Cleveland's action, or the accuracy with which he then developed a fundamental doctrine of American polity, one impressive fact cannot be questioned. The interpretation which he gave was instantly accepted by his countrymen and has been confirmed and extended by his successors. In less than a decade, indeed, its farreaching significance was to receive a practical demonstration. Had nothing else occurred to make his administration memorable, this Venezuelan incident would have sufficed: since through it, President Cleveland left an ineffaceable mark upon the history, not of the United States alone, but of the whole Western Hemisphere and of the world.

*Times, November 14, 1896.

†Stanwood, A History of the Presidency, p. 520. (Boston, 1898.)

#Foster, A Century of American Diplomacy, p. 473. (New York, 1900.)

O any one who looks upon the tendencies of modern fiction with a broad sanity of judgment, there is something rather irritating in the arbitrary narrowness of the hackneyed phrase, a novel with a purpose. One wonders by what occult process of logic or linguistics it came to be restricted only to those novels written with a particular sort of purpose, and thus by implication to stigmatise all other novels as having been written with no purpose at all. One might very justly claim that a story written quite frankly with no higher purpose than that of affording an hour's entertainment is just as much entitled to have its purpose recognised as is the novel written to convince us of the errors of Mormonism or the cruelty of vivisection. But without stopping to quibble over the literal meaning of the phrase, it seems worth while to ask whether, even in its narrower sense, it is intelligently applied? Whether, in short, the novelists who are popularly recognised as the best exponents of the Purpose Novel have really hit upon the most effective way of indicting the existing conditions of life and of preaching

reform.

tp

When an author sits down to write a Purpose Novel, he is really trying to sugar-coat a lesson in religion, or economics, or social ethics. He is convinced that certain existing conditions, ranging anywhere from the principle of a protective tariff to the prevalent use of chewing gum, is threatening the integrity of the nation, and that he has been foreordained to effect a reformation. And so, with misplaced zeal, he produces a sort of literary paradox, a realistic allegory, a twentieth century Esop's Fable, fitting the award to virtue and the punishment to the crime with a sureness and a celerity never seen outside of an oldfashioned Sunday-school story or a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. It does not

seem to make much difference how wise or skilful or broad-minded a writer is, the instant that he convinces himself that some single error of theology or social customs or business usage is responsible for a large share of existing evil; the instant he takes up his pen to abolishrace suicide, let us say, or the prevailing manner of dressing the hair; the instant he says to himself, "I will write a story proving that only the parents of families exceeding the dozen limit shall inherit the earth; or, that all the foolish virgins who wear pompadours shall remain unhappy old maids," he is unconsciously making an atrocious caricature of life. Even such an uncompromising dealer in facts as Emile Zola, in the very ripeness of his powers, became, under the obsession of his Four Gospels, guilty of such opéra-bouffe extravagance as the closing chapters of Fécondité and Travail.

In real life, Nature has her own way of footing up the account. In every generation there are certain established standards of living, physical and moral, which an individual or a nation violate at their own peril. The author who learns, by actual observation of life, that certain social abuses sooner or later bring. their own punishment, and who can put the fruit of his observations into a story; with the dispassionate art of a painter picturing a group of storm clouds, is writing the only sort of Purpose Novel that is worthy of the name. Yet a novel of this sort must, by definition, be the purest and most unadulterated sort of realism. The personal equation, the spirit of the reformer, the whole motive that gives the Purpose Novel its name might just as well be absent for all the influence it has in shaping the plot of the novel based upon direct observation of life. Suppose, for instance, that a novelist of the first rank should undertake to write a story that should be an indictment of modern business methods, of unlawful combinations of capital, of "graft" in politics, and law courts, and