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Sir George Clifford's pronouncement admirably summarises claims that can be advanced in favour of the totalisator. The financial benefits that accrue from it to racing and breeding are incalculable. In many countries where racing flourishes there would be no racing at all, and in others sport of a very poor type, if revenue from the 'tote' were not forthcoming. British breeders benefit to a marked extent from the prosperity of the Turf in other lands, and both they and every one associated with the British Turf will gain by the adoption of the totalisator system in this country. The extent of the gain will largely depend upon the amount of money the bookmakers are able to divert from the machine.

We know that the gross revenue from the Betting Duty was 2,766,000l. during the first twelve months of its collection. In all probability about 20 per cent. of that sum, or say 553,000l., was produced by the 2 per cent. levy on the racecourse turnover, which would, therefore, be 27,650,000l. For various reasons, one being industrial depression, attendances and the volume of betting at race meetings in 1927 were subnormal. Suppose, therefore, we may assume that a racecourse betting turnover of 30,000,000l. per annum can be looked for. If half of that money passes through the totalisator, a 10 per cent. levy will yield a gross revenue of 1,500,000%. The Exchequer will want one-fifth (2 per cent. of the turnover), or 300,000l. The cost of working the totalisators, and interest on capital outlay, will no doubt absorb another 300,000l. This will leave a net revenue of 900,000l. at the disposal of the central authority that is to be set up. To that 900,000l. will be added what are known as the 'fractions.' When a pool comes to be divided among those entitled to share it there is always a small indivisible surplus. In England the calculators will presumably work to the sixpence, and the coppers left over will be the perquisite of the machine. In practice it has been found that the surpluses thus accumulated amount to nearly 1 per cent. of the turnover. Adding the fractions, the net revenue from the totalisator would be approximately a round million pounds. This seems a huge sum, but when it comes to be distributed there will be none too much. The total

value of the stakes competed for on the Turf in Great Britain in 1927 was 779,1457. About half of that money was contributed by the owners of the horses. But if British owners were on the same footing as their fellows in Australia they would have been asked to find last year not 389,000l. but only 130,000l., a difference of 259,000l. Eventually the tote 'fund should provide that 'difference' in the shape of money added to races. Then again, a large proportion of races in this country are worth less than 2001. to the winners, and horses that finish second or third get little or nothing. The value of such races should be raised at least 50 per cent., and there ought to be substantial allocations to the 'placed horses. It may not be generally known that, apart from subscriptions and forfeits, it costs over 4002. per annum to keep, train, and race a horse, and they do not all win.

After the burdens of owners have been lightened there will be the claims of the public to consider. The accommodation provided at most of our racecourses is distressingly inadequate-a constant cause of amazement to visitors from other parts of the world. Millions of pounds could, without doing anything extravagant, be spent in putting that matter right. All the revenue the totalisator can yield will be sorely needed for many years to come. Perhaps some day in the not distant future we shall be able to lift up our heads and point proudly to a Turf whose policy, finances, and appointments will challenge comparison with those of any institution of its kind in the world. Everything depends on the totalisator.

EDWARD MOORHOUSE.

Art. 10.-THE GENIUS OF MENANDER.

Or the hundred and five plays of Menander which circulated in ancient times no copies survived in the libraries of the Middle Ages. For centuries Menander could not be judged by his own work. He naturally retained the high place in literature that had been assigned to him in ancient times, and students made the most of the numerous excerpts from his plays that were quoted in other writers, some eighteen hundred lines in all. Moreover, the adaptations of Plautus and Terence seemed to give the best clue to the dramatic quality of his work. Nevertheless, it was clearly impossible to have any real acquaintance with Menander under those conditions. We have only to consider the plight of a later critic who might attempt to reconstruct the plays of Shakespeare from excerpts in dictionaries and in collections of familiar quotations, aided by such adaptations as Dryden's 'All for Love.'

Fortunately for us many recent finds have added to our knowledge of Menander. Most worthy of note is the discovery by Lefebvre in Egypt toward the end of the year 1905 of the remains of a papyrus codex that had contained several plays of his. This book had evidently been torn up by some functionary of the Roman imperial administration, probably in the sixth century after Christ, and its leaves had been used to protect the contents of a huge jar filled with legal documents. As a result of this bit of good fortune we have sufficient fragments of three plays, amounting in all to about fifteen hundred lines, to enable us to reconstruct the plots with fair plausibility and to appreciate Menander's sympathetic delineation of character.

Though we have the material to enable us to appreciate Menander, it does not follow that Menander has always been appreciated by those who have studied that material. It should require no argument to prove that all scholars are not literary critics, that not all professors, any more than all parsons or all artists, can enjoy a lively picture on the stage of ordinary people caught in the web of circumstance and revealing their humanity in spite of themselves. Anyone, however, who does enjoy studying and interpreting human nature will find that there Vol. 250.-No. 496.

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is much literary delight to be found in tracing the interplay of purposes and cross-purposes in a comedy of Menander. Each character-with his or her distinct complex of motives - motives which fit always the individual and his environment-acts and reacts with perfect plausibility; and each separate act advances the general movement of the plot. There is nothing accidental. The humblest slave has his own personality, and acts each time as he has to act in order to meet, with his particular endowment, the needs of his particular situation. Yet the play as a whole goes forward. The separate motives clash, each act produces its widening circle of influence, and in the end a result is reached to which every one in the action has contributed his share without any intention other than to further his own interest or to do his private duty. The ordinary play does not give the illusion of life, because it lacks overtones. The relation of the parts to the whole is too simple. The actors in the drama are abstracted from life-that is to say, they do not retain in the play the little whimsicalities and irrational impulses that give people in life their individual flavour; they retain, abstracted from the rest, merely those motives needed for the development of the play. It is the overtones in Menander that give him his variety and charm; and they justify the exclamation of the ancient critic: '0 Life, O Menander, which is the copy?'

For the ancient critics had no doubt of Menander's superiority over all other writers of comedy, Greek and Latin alike. He is even recommended to the young for study along with Homer. Nor need we be surprised at this, for he does indeed have in great measure the liveliness, the variety and the universality of Homer. He has also Homer's gift of creating a world of his own and of peopling that world with charming characters. No matter how much we might disapprove of Homer's people or of Menander's if we were to meet them in our world, yet in their own world they are so illumined by a penetrating sympathy and by the poet's detachment and imagination that we see in them something eternally beautiful. To be sure, there are unedifying clowns in Menander, just as in Homer we have Thersites, but an apology for clowns is hardly needed among people who

g admire Shakespeare. The slave and the peasant are in Led general much more sympathetically treated in Menander than in Shakespeare.

With regard to the life of Menander little is known. He was a citizen of Athens, was born in the year 343 or soon after, and died at the age of fifty-two, probably in the year 291. He was as far from the age of Pericles as we are from the period of Napoleon. Euripides was as remote as Wordsworth is to us. Demosthenes, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great are the names that represent for us the world of his youth. None of them survived Menander's twenty-first year. He was himself a pupil of Aristotle's successor in philosophy, Theophrastus, author of the Characters.' The philosopher Epicurus was his contemporary and fellow Athenian. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was in Athens for the last twenty years of Menander's life. His uncle, Alexis, had been writing for the comic theatre for a generation before Menander and was to continue for nearly a generation after his death. Philemon and Diphilus were contemporary rivals who long outlived him. Probably Menander really was drowned while swimming near Athens, as one writer informs us, for his productive period was less than half as long as that of his rivals who died a natural death.

He came of good family and was the friend of Demetrius of Phalerum who ruled the city for ten years (317-307 B.C.) in the Macedonian interest. When Demetrius fell from power and the democrats established a government, Menander is said to have been temporarily in danger, as a friend of the old regime. A little later one of his plays was refused a production, perhaps because of some unfavourable allusion to the new government. The kings of Egypt and of Macedonia sent ships and personal representatives to invite him to visit their courts, but he preferred to remain quietly in Athens.

We hear that he squinted and that in regard to women his enthusiasm passed all bounds. This may be an inference from his plays, but in any case the inference would be justified. Of his hundred and five (some say three or four more) plays there was none without its love-story. In fact, Plutarch speaks of love as the