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whether three should be the number of representatives for each constituency, are details to be settled after the principle is recognised. If in one or other of these methods it is eventually established, we may see fewer all-powerful Ministries and fewer violent swings of the pendulum. There probably will be more continuity between successive Parliaments, as they will cease to represent in turn the exaggerated preponderance of one side or the other. Legislation may be less rapid, but safer against reversal, because it will be in a further degree than at present the expression of the permanent, well-considered and deliberate decision of the country.

COLCHESTER.

A COLONIAL STUDY OF LONDON

CIVILISATION

THE articles that have been published in this Review on the subject of English insularity have brought out very clearly the divergence of type between the Englishman and the New Zealander. The first two articles express the views of a Colonial, born and educated in his own country, who has already had some career there and whose claim to represent its indigenous opinion is not much affected by an attack published in the humorous columns of a local newspaper of dissimilar politics. The reply of the Rhodes scholar, expressing the inherited or imported view, is that of a New Zealander educated at Oxford; but even he treats England with a certain detachment and draws contrasts which practically concede the growth of a separate nationality. Our 'Motherland' is, and must be, the country that bore and bred us, and the sentiment that gives the title even to the land of our forefathers is either unreal or unpatriotic. New Zealanders, however, are not a new or 'young' people, springing from unknown savage sources like the Tongans or Fijians; they possess as fully as any native-born Briton the intellectual heritage left by our common ancestors; all the centuries of English history that precede the last fifty or sixty years are their own. It is only from that date that they diverge. They are a British people, who from the outset were more adventurous and less trammelled by convention than the majority of their countrymen, and who, having settled in an untamed country and amidst primitive circumstances, dropped off much of the social prejudice and superstition, the fossilised traditions and antique customs, and at the same time lost much of the artistic and polished perfection of style and appearance that characterises twentieth-century England. Briefly, the main difference is that the English are conserving and polishing an ancient type of society based on the predominance and happiness of a small section of the nation, while the Antipodeans are labouring to evolve a newer and more comprehensive social system. Those who return to the home of their ancestral

'A Colonial View of Colonial Loyalty' (The Nineteenth Century, October 1903); 'The Insularity of the English' (The Nineteenth Century, April 1906); Insularity of the English: Another Colonial View' (The Nineteenth Century, September 1906). 559

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race find themselves face to face with a gigantic and highly developed civilisation. Either their imagination is overwhelmed or else an instinct of criticism is aroused. Had there not been a critical spirit in New Zealand, the country never would have attempted to avoid the old social evils, but would have slavishly copied good and bad alike. Mr. Thomson's statement that all who remain long enough in England must fall in love with the conservative spirit, might be less questionable if he had written in Oxford' instead of 'in England.' For in the venerable university town, with its architectural beauty, its consecrated traditions, its aloofness from the vulgar struggle for wealth and position, the conservatism of old forms shows its most attractive aspect.

But it is London and not Oxford which is the true product of old-world civilisation; London which almost blots out the rest of England by its own supreme significance. Now London, instead of converting all Colonials to the ancient class system, has converted to uncompromising State Socialism several who were once inclined towards the so-called 'Conservative party' in New Zealand; because they see here in the industrial proletariat the terrible price that must be paid for Conservatism. Not all may see it, or care to see it. It is not a sufficiently amusing sight for tourists. No individual Colonial can claim to speak for the whole colony. Some will criticise, some will admire, each according to their temperament. London must be with all either a grande passion or a mortal antipathy. So it has been amongst provincials, and so it is still. Its literary lovers have been fewer than its haters, probably because its civilisation is materialistic and unspiritual. To Edward FitzGerald the city was hideous and monstrous; Gissing painted it as a sordid modern inferno; its own Cockney poet described it, in one of the most profoundly gloomy poems ever written, as the City of Dreadful Night.' Yet in hate as well as in love it draws to it all talent that is free to move, just as it did in the days of Shakespeare or of Goldsmith. It is a huge emporium that forces the smaller shops off the field of competition, or reduces them to the position of supporting a bare existence by supplying immediate local needs. Even Edinburgh has had to abdicate its old literary sovereignty; no young Scotch poet or philosopher of our days dreams of seeking a career in the city that was once the Athens of the North. Nor can any British colony hope to compete even within its own boundaries with the enormous supplies of literature poured into it from the British market. Englishmen sometimes resent the high places which Scotchmen win for themselves in the Church, the Government, in literature and the professions. But it is Scotland that is the loser. Its nationality is yielded up and its intellectual vigour is drained away to feed the greatness of the metropolis. The same centripetal movement has begun from the farthest_colonies. What the British Empire has been to the world,

that London now is to the Empire. The greatness of our ancestral race lies in its enormous national digestion. It swallows up tribes, races, territories, whole empires; and not only swallows but assimilates them, suppressing native characteristics or making them subservient to its own expansion. Far beyond the limits of its nominal dominion its influence has spread, conquering more by persistent and invincible faith in itself than by cannon, and substituting everywhere the English style in dress, architecture, food, and customs for the native style. But in London the force is that of attraction instead of diffusion abroad. Here come the provincials, the Scotch, the Irish, the Americans, the Colonials, the foreigners; for pleasure, for education, for a career, or for a refuge. The city sorts them out for its various uses, grinds down their distinctive features, fits them into its own scheme, and turns them out not so much individualities as atoms of a social system. Something of the original substance may be left, but first and foremost all citizens must be Londoners, and only in the second place Devonians, Cornishmen, or North Countrymen. In the case of Colonials the process of assimilation is more rapid, because their distinctive character is as yet only in the making,' but amongst them too there is an unassimilated remnant.

In trying to discover anything like a uniform design amongst this heterogeneous web of material, an onlooker is continually perplexed by inconsistencies. Modern travellers have a trick of stating that the country they happen to be describing-America, China, India, or Russia—is a land of paradox and a bundle of contradictions. This is a safe remark to make of all communities, and may serve to qualify any dogmatic generalising about the cosmopolitan millions compressed within the narrow space of the capital, divided into hostile groups or solitary outcasts. But yet amongst all the units of various races and classes there is—and here comes in the civilisation and the art of living together somehow-a modus vivendi or working agreement. The first clause of that agreement is external conformity to English laws, written and unwritten. Provided that decorum is preserved, almost anything is allowed to pass with impunity, the object being always to prevent a scene or disturbance. Sometimes, indeed, for the sake of a half-humorous sensation, there is a mild attack made on concealed vices, but no one really takes the matter seriously. The typical Londoner censures very severely trifling faults of manner or dress, but takes elaborate pains to ignore vices, perhaps because these are much more troublesome things to deal with. The tolerance or, more bluntly speaking, the laxity of the West is extraordinary, and any primitive-minded stranger who shows a hearty and healthy dislike of sin and of sinners is regarded as a disagreeable and cantankerous disturber of the peace. Though crimes of violence are proportionally rare, fraud and dissolute living seem to flourish without restraint or punishment. The respectable citizens

pretend an absolutely impossible ignorance of what goes on at or even within their own doors, or if the evil is forced upon their attention, they refer to it as a trifling peculiarity of the foreign residents. On the other hand, it is very hard to believe in the sensational murderers whom Mr. G. R. Sims has described. And even with regard to the vices that do exist, the West Centre is not one universal blackness. So far from being chiefly inhabited by criminals, Bloomsbury is and must continue to be, on account of its centrality, the home of tourists, Museum readers, scholars, and professionals, who are quite unromantically respectable and most undramatically virtuous. But it is true that here the innocent are mixed with the guilty, and live side by side with them, apparently in complete harmony while one cloak of decorum covers them both. This means, not universal viciousness, but something dangerously near universal hypocrisy. The endurance of evil in order to prevent friction is a modification of the law of respectability, and it has been made a custom in order to suit the needs and fashions of our age.

Whether, as some British patriots assert, it is the fault of the alien population, or whether we are suffering a reaction from the strictness of the Victorian era, must be left to conjecture, but certainly, from some cause or other, there is a good deal of the Restoration spirit abroad in London to-day. Puritanism is a term to jeer at; such words as righteousness, purity, goodness, virtue are considered cant terms; women and womanhood are a butt for the wits of the Press; and earnestness is held a conclusive proof of lack of humour. It is difficult for any individual to remain serious, because the mood of the multitude is light-hearted, humorous and optimistic, and much more tolerant of sin than of seriousness. We are relaxing in an age of comedy, and its spirit has been strong enough to inspire a brilliant revival of the English drama. We have at least one playwright equal to Sheridan. Even the ephemeral journalism of our day is witty, often extremely witty, though in a score of periodicals a reader might search in vain for one distinctively original and powerful article or tale that is idealistic or profound. The nation is having one of its periodic fits of revolt from its own solemnity, and with characteristic British strenuousness is deliberately and conscientiously enjoying itself. Old-fashioned critics may still go on solemnly abusing the gloomy pessimism' and 'introspective tendencies' of the times, but they are simply belabouring corpses. The most remarkable plays at the opening of the nineteenth century were the fantastic or tragic plays of Byron, Shelley, Joanna Baillie, and Bulwer Lytton; the most remarkable at the opening of the twentieth century are those of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Pinero.

But the comparison with the Restoration period must not be pushed too far. In modern London 'vice has lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.' Or rather the grossness now lies only in the

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