character, and character is rarely revealed at a first encounter. Even a great Cantata, like Herr gehe nicht in's Gericht' is connoisseurs' music-that is, music for the ear that knows by practice how to listen. For listening comes by practice. Study of musical theory will help; but hearing must come first. A safe rule for the plain man is not to bother about musical terms until he encounters a form, an effect, a figure, or a chord that he wants to know how to describe. He will then naturally turn to the books or friends that can enlighten him. To put study of the language of music in this inferior position is not to minimise its importance. A knowledge of musical form adds greatly to the intelligent hearer's enjoyment. It enables him to take in more at once than the untaught hearer can. The untaught hearer may hear beauty in the mass; the instructed hearer will hear the fine shades as well. But the course of the plain man is clear. He must practise hearing by hearing; and by hearing he will learn what there is to hear. If his enjoyment gives him an impulse to systematic study, he can teach himself much-he can, for instance, get an idea of fugue from the text-books, and turn for illustration to player-piano rolls or gramophone records, which will repeat the difficult passages patiently for him as often as he wishes.

The plain man of the future will be in a happier position than his father. Music, once belittled as an accomplishment of unwashed foreigners or received, at the best, as an exotic, is now an integral part of education in schools of all grades and kinds. The language and laws of music have at least as much claim to be taught to ordinary children as the language and laws of chemistry. The best approach to music is made at schools where everybody is the choir, and where, as a consequence, an affectation of superiority on the ground of having no ear' is hardly likely to be impressive. The bragging spirit takes many forms, but none so ludicrous as a boast (generally quite untrue) of inability 'to tell one tune from another.' The assumption is always that this defect is a symptom of superiority, though the exact nature of the superiority is never indicated and never discernible. There are, unfortunately, tone-deaf people, though many fewer than those

who assume a deformity when they have it not; but such people are not specially estimable, as they are, in fact, physical deficients, like the colour-blind, who are rarely found boasting of their misfortune. The ability to hear music is part of the complete man's equipment; he is less a man by the extent to which he lacks that ability. It is not unfitting to remind ourselves that an ancient legend made music open the gates of hell. Hell has no music; music is the very air of Heaven.

The sensible teaching of music in schools, aided by such inventions as the player-piano, the gramophone, and wireless transmission, will soon make musical ignorance rare. The influence of musical festivals and competitions has been valuable in one direction; illustrated lessons in the appreciation of music (the art of music) and in the theory of music (the science or grammar of music) have been valuable in another direction. But the most valuable work done by school music is the undermining of the recent superstition that the enjoyment of good music is an affair of class or coterie. The new generation will know better than that. It will know that music is for all. It will have rediscovered the England which produced the folk-songs and the Tudor music now honoured as great national treasures. It will understand that the simples and gentles of Shakespeare's world sang to each other and with each other because song is human and morose silence devilish. It will inherit by natural right all that has been sung and played in the world since the morning stars sang together. In short, it will know that the best music for the plain man is the best music.

GEORGE SAMPSON.

Art. 6.—THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY OF INTERNATIONAL LABOUR LEGISLATION.

IF international labour legislation possesses a social philosophy, that philosophy is to be found in the constitution and the activities of the International Labour Organisation, to which was entrusted by Part XIII of the Peace Treaty the chief responsibility for the encouragement of labour legislation on an international basis. Those who framed the Treaty may not have been explicitly conscious of any underlying philosophy in the instrument they drafted. Part XIII of the Treaty, like most parts of most treaties, was historically the resultant of forces sometimes co-operating, sometimes conflicting. In the Treaty as a whole, questions of principle were struggled over and compromised upon, while matters of less importance formed the subject of barter and crossbarter. To some extent, at any rate, the atmosphere in which Part XIII was hammered out was an idealistic one, where principles counted for more and expediency for less than is usual in diplomatic encounters. Even here, however, concessions had to be granted, allowances had to be made, exceptions had to be provided for. If in the minds of any of the delegates a social philosophy of international labour legislation existed, these concessions and derogations may well have seemed to affect its logical basis with a suggestion of inner disintegration.

A social philosophy, though it may choose an individual as its means of expression, is always the product of a social experience. And, historically, the international social philosophy to which we are trying to give explicit formulation is the product of the international social experience in which the world was living in the closing months of 1918 and the opening ones of 1919. The period of the peace negotiations was one in which the desire for social justice found unanimous acceptance. Labour legislation and labour regulation had assumed a very special importance during the war. In the prosecution of the war, governments had entered into engagements with the workers to remove the 'injustice, hardship, and privation,' from which in many occupations and in many countries the wage-earners

suffered. The workers themselves had realised, as never before, the essential rôle which they played in the national economy, not only in war, but also in peace, and they were determined that the importance and dignity of the functions of labour should receive practical international recognition. And over all and through all, in the hearts of all men of good will, stirred a generous and genuine desire for social peace. In this atmosphere of peace and good will, while the attitudes of all nations were not necessarily identical, nor even, within each nation, the interests of the Government, the employers, and the workers, there was a sufficient community of purpose, a sufficient harmony of spirit to make possible the adoption in Part XIII of the Peace Treaty of an instrument that was intended to be not a dead formula, but a living body with a life-giving soul.

It was in an era of action that Part XIII was drafted, with a practical purpose and as part of a Treaty that it was hoped would work. If any philosophy existed in it, it was nobody's business to make it clear. Action always precedes reflexion, for reflexion or philosophy, as we understand it, always involves the backward look, the attempt to analyse and understand the experience and action of the past. It may perhaps be objected that the past in this case is too recent for fruitful philosophic reflexion. 'You are too much immersed,' it may be said, 'in the new international life created by the Treaty, to permit you to attain to the completely dispassionate standpoint of the philosopher, the spectator of all time and all eternity.' In this objection there is, no doubt, a modicum of truth, but let us not exaggerate it. In some cases, indeed, the philosopher who seeks to interpret a movement may do his work better when he regards it like some lifeless specimen under the microscope, or, like the Greek city state, through the telescope of time. In other cases, however, interpretation may be facilitated, not impeded, when those who interpret, though standing at some distance from the focus, are still sufficiently within the circumference of the influences of the movement to be inspired by its spirit. To philosophise is to love wisdom, and it is hard to love the social wisdom which is social philosophy without having a part also in the social experience from which it comes. Without

further apologia, therefore, we proceed to ask, What is the Social Philosophy of Part XIII of the Treaty?

The main principle to be clearly discerned is the principle of synthesis. The importance of the principle of synthesis in Part XIII is immediately evident in the Preamble. Whereas the League of Nations has for its object the establishment of universal peace, and such a peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice. . . . In the very first words of the Preamble the note is struck which is the key to the whole harmony. The two interrelated principles on which the whole edifice is built are universal peace and social justice. Now each of these is pre-eminently a principle of synthesis. 'Universal peace' obviously involves the overcoming of national differences, the supersession of national incompatibilities. 'Social justice,' which, we are told in the Preamble, is the basis of universal peace, is a supreme manifestation of the principle of synthesis. The fundamental idea in social justice is the conception of a synthesis of opposing claims. Justice does not involve simply the absence of conflicting points of view. This would be a negative conception. It is something positive, and implies the ultimate conciliation of differences, the unification of fragmentary aspects of the truth.

This conception is further exemplified in the second paragraph of the Preamble. We are there told that 'conditions of labour exist involving such injustice, hardship, and privation . . . that the peace and harmony of the world are imperilled.' To the idea of peace this paragraph, therefore, adds the conception of harmony. Social harmony is regarded as desirable: it is endangered by the conflicts, explicit or latent, involved in existing conditions of labour. Where hardship and privation exist, there is a fruitful cause of the conflicts of war. Few lessons of history are clearer than that the causes of war are often, if not usually, in part at least economic. When Napoleon urged his ragged regiments to the conquest of Lombardy plains he was appealing to one of man's fundamental instincts. It is not only in the modern world that the economic causes of war are prominent. Modern war is not essentially different from the brigandage of the Homeric chieftains and the state