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been to conquer and to govern. Every national quality fits Englishmen for this career; their practical ability; their stoical endurance of their own pain and their insensibility to the pain of others; their Olympic pose; their unparalleled genius for humbug; their unflinching determination to do right and also at the same time to get the better of everyone else; but above all their enormous powers of absorption. The Olympic pose is a much subtler and more impressive thing than such a swagger as that of the Heidelberg Korps Student. Continentals, and also the unassimilated Colonials and Americans, recognise it, and occasionally chafe under it; but, however much they may criticise it in its absence, they all bow down before its presence. An impassive attitude has been the immemorial attribute of all ruling nations, from the days of the Romans to the days of the Turks. It suggests rather than claims a superiority to human passions and emotions. It does not seem to have been brought to perfection in England until after the close of the Napoleonic wars, when London became the dominant city of the dominant race of the world. The keynote to the character of a twentieth-century Londoner is an unbounded Imperial pride. He never forgets himself; never gives himself away; he imputes to himself the loftiest motives and highest authority; when any accident proves him in the wrong, he has an amazing talent for saving his face and assuming to himself the merits of the very person or measure he has been fighting. Ten years hence, when the Women's Franchise Bill has become law, Mr. Asquith may be making a speech dwelling on the zeal his party has shown for political justice to women. Devices of this kind have always been familiar to pedagogues and masters. A subject should never be allowed to find out that his master can make mistakes, or that he can laugh or cry or fall ill or get into a temper. This is the real explanation of the dignified and unemotional dulness of many English households. It is not of himself as a mere individual that the Londoner is proud; in regard to his own attainments he is often extraordinarily modest. But he has an inordinate pride in his race and in his city, and in himself as a citizen. He never admits a doubt that in respect of being a Londoner he is immeasurably superior to any and every stranger, and on any and every point. Such a doubt no more occurs to him than it would have occurred to an Imperial Roman or Byzantine when comparing himself to a Barbarian. This attitude of his is useful in helping on the assimilation of fresh elements, for the stranger gets tired of paying continual tribute and claims citizenship, which is readily granted.

In the eighteenth century the nation was militant, and the national qualities were bluntly and brutally conspicuous. It was then that Goldsmith saw the lords of human kind,' and marked 'the pride in their port, defiance in their eye.' To-day the 'lords' have become polite; to the surprised admiration of the French. The age of blatant

Jingoism has gone by. The struggle is over; the supremacy is won, and is worn now with sovereign courtesy. The foreigners are no longer saluted with brickbats and abuse, but with the smile of conscious superiority and amiable patronage. But however gently they are handled, they soon learn that they are in the grip of a very strong nationality. A common motif in Colonial stories, and one that is drawn from real life, is the mistaken contempt of the rougher, larger men of the backwoods for some exquisitely civilised 'new-chum' English gentleman, who in the hour of danger proves himself the greatest hero of all. And it is true that even in the most savage wilds of the Empire there is not more mute heroism shown than the brick walls of London witness every day. Courage has, indeed, reached an almost non-human Stoicism here, attributable partly to the pride of race, but still more to the fierce fight for life and power. London, which upon the surface is a comedy, is below the surface a great tragedy. The civilisation of feeling has gone only a few inches down, and beneath its crust the barbaric instincts of fighting and conquering have free play. They have changed their methods, and they have become hypocritical, but their object is still the same. There is only one religion in London whose worshippers are all devoutly sincere, and that is the cult of success. The city is nothing but a social battlefield, where every man's hand is against every other man and against every woman; where there are a few great prizes for the conquerors, a footing for those who can hold their own, and for the rest a place on the ground, in the dust and mud under the feet of the conquerors. The essential spirit of this community is still force and strength. The real human fellowship is not yet in sight. In this city— the greatest birth of time-our race has discovered no other way of human beings coming into contact except by secret conflict. The young, the sick, the afflicted, and often, too, those who are spiritually finer than their fellows, fall and drop out of the ranks without a murmur. Even in the higher circles those who have failed know that they must pay the penalty of being slighted and shunned by former friends. It is for their failure that the prosperous Londoner detests the unemployed, and not for the alleged causes of self-indulgence and dislike to work, for these weaknesses are superstitiously admired when they appear amongst the leisured class. 'All crimes are safe, but hated '-failure. All the vast charity of London has not got as far as the simple communism of the South Sea Islanders, who share their food with every member of the tribe. In London, under the feet of the dominant and successful, there is a mass of degraded, cramped, stunted humanity, incapable of rising, content with its abject condition, denied the birthright of savages, bound in industrial slavery, and fixed in an unacknowledged and hypocritical classsubjection. The conservative law that suppresses the mass, the conservative instinct that keeps them in their place, are nothing but

the inherited law and the primal instincts of the brute and the barbarian.

The men and women of the New World, who inherit so large a share in this civilisation and who yet are free to start over again, are by no means mental and moral infants. They may claim the right that English provincials have exercised in the past of observing and criticising freely, instead of merely sitting down in barren admiration. It is well for an Imperial nation, instead of merely reproducing itself in inferior and dwarf copies, to give birth to new nations and to new systems of civilisation. The future of the Colonies can never be in the direction of splendid conquest and universal dominion, but it may be towards social advance and social independence.

EDITH SEARLE GROSSMANN.

SOME LONDON CHILDREN AT PLAY

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IN the month of February of this year an interesting article was contributed by Mr. Frank R. Benson to this Review, entitled An Attempt to Revive the Dramatic Habit.' In this article he speaks of a marked increase of activity in the sphere of folk drama,' more especially in country districts, and describes it with equal truth and assurance as a promising means of relieving much of the dulness of our rural life.' And if folk drama, historical pageants, and the presentment of Shakespeare's plays may serve to relieve the monotony of existence and to stimulate the imaginations of country people, surely not less useful as an educating force may be the exercise of the dramatic habit for those whose lives are passed in the turmoil of a large city such as London. I do not in this connection refer to the West End nor to the West End theatres, but rather to those poor and densely populated quarters where the desirability of being able to escape occasionally, if only in fancy, from the squalid surroundings and the daily struggle for bread, is yet more urgent in the interests of the national character. Such a thought was in my mind, when an invitation reached me last January to be one of a few privileged spectators from the West at the performance of an East-end pantomime which was to be entirely the product of local talent and to be acted in a parish schoolroom by the children of the neighbourhood. This was certainly to be no 'folk-drama,' properly so-called, still less an historical pageant. Even child-life in the East of London is too strenuous, too concerned with the present, to be keenly appreciative of any appeal from the remote past. Yet none the less it has seemed to me that in this local play full of local interests there might surely be found yet another instance of that revival of the dramatic habit which Mr. Benson so warmly advocates. The pantomime of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was, as we have said, to be a home grown product, woven out of material real and fantastic, topical and historical, in so far as the past five or six years may be said to represent history, by the fertile brain of the vicar of the parish, and to be acted under his tuition by some of the better looking and more gifted members of his little flock. And who better, on the face of it, should understand the minds of his people, young and old, how to appeal to their imagination, quicken

their patriotic interest in passing events, and vitalise their sense of humour, than this very real pastor whose active brain and heart and hands are alike given in hourly and untiring service to his immense family? This vicar's parish may be covered by a walk of five minutes in one direction and of four minutes in another, but for all that it contains at least ten thousand people, with nearly all of whom he and his band of fellow workers have a personal acquaintance. Who then should know better the local jokes, or be able to turn to more picturesque account the peculiarities of local character and local colour?

In the West End we have piled up our fires, shivered in our furs, and wondered what folly could induce us to venture abroad while London is held in the grip of the blackest frost of a remarkably black winter. Here in the East, in the drab narrow streets south of the Commercial Road, significant signs of the severity of the weather are to be found in tightly closed doors and windows, and a complete absence of ragged babies playing in the gutter. Where fires are of necessity scarce, some semblance of warmth or at least stuffiness must be procured by the sealing up of all possible apertures against the biting wind.

But in the low-ceilinged blue-washed schoolroom, all is warmth and geniality. The atmosphere, already redolent of oranges and peppermint, would no doubt be described by the audience as 'comforting,'! Rows and rows of school-children from the surrounding parishes have been safely shepherded to their places amongst the natives, for this temporary theatre is ready every Saturday evening through the month of January to open its hospitable doors to less fortunate neighbours. Many little Jewish faces are noticeable, for here we are in near proximity with a Jewish quarter only less dense than that of the Ghetto itself. Room has also to be made for a number of proud parents, relations and friends of the little performers, but of the alien element from the West of London we find ourselves the only representatives.

Two benches right in front, immediately before the footlights, are crowded with very small boys, choir boys apparently, amongst whom has somehow succeeded in inserting herself an equally small and extremely self-contained girl. She exchanges no remarks with her chosen companions, but sits bolt upright, pressed like a sardine between two of them, in a very clean pinafore, whilst a bush of well-frizzed hair surrounds a sharp little face and a pair of dark eager eyes, which never for a moment remove themselves from the life-like representation of the Tower Bridge which forms the drop scene. Afterwards we are told that she is of German extraction, which may account for her forward position and for her ill-disguised contempt for the elbows of the British boy, but there is no Teutonic stolidity in the interest with which later she follows every movement on the stage, and her

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