work, but it is more clearly marked in his letters. These, once more, next to a personal acquaintance, supplement, if they do not supersede, the closest intimacy that can come of book and biography.

At this point I must briefly interpolate that most of us will recognise the right method of quoting the Bible or Shakespeare in support of this or that opinion; we must be careful to bring forward citations on both sides of the question. Then we can strike a balance, for it is the general drift we must seek to determine. So with passages from the letters of an author. He is placed at a disadvantage unless we recognise the foregoing principles of citation, even if we find it impossible to apply them as fully as might be wished. This was in my mind when, as above, I spoke of the intensely interesting biography that is to be read in an entire correspondence. 'Parts,' says Dr. Johnson, not to be examined until the whole has been surveyed,' and in the instance before us, as I have suggested already, we constantly find that passages in an earlier letter are modified by one later in date. We all have our moods, sometimes, it may be, an excess of modesty; in one letter to me Mr. Harrison disclaims any pretensions to a prose style, but in another he devotes two or three pages to a most interesting analysis of his methods of composition.

are

This was touched upon on an earlier page of the present article, in connection with the subject of conversation; it is of still greater importance under this head.

For instance, I have received a copy of The British Weekly which contains a letter written by Mr. Frederic Harrison to a friend. In this letter (dated January 2, 1923) are such passages as the following:

Every board in civilisation is cracking. Literature, drama, art, industry, government, peace, and order are all being swept over by a flood of democratic vulgarity. All public problems seem to me fated by ruin.

There will be no real settlement of reparations and of Europe at Paris to-day or any time.

As might be guessed from some preceding remarks in this paper, I am reluctant to accept the despondency we seem to discover in these extracts as being the last, or unqualified, or permanent outlook of this great mind, and, as the point is of

A supreme Providence that rules our efforts towards good, one whom we can love, serve and adore.' This is in striking contrast with that eternal Humanity from which he' (man) 'derives all that he has, and to which all that he can give is but justly due.' See the present writer's review of ' On Society' in the Hibbert Journal, April 1919.

considerable importance, I shall venture to quote from a letter written to myself some little time before:

Gloomy hours they are, for I see nothing but bankruptcy, chaos, civil jar, ruin and famine before us now for a decade. It seems a pity the war is ended if the peoples of Europe are to commit suicide and starve themselves to death.

One significant addition in the above letter is conveyed by the phrase ' for a decade'; but we have to notice yet more carefully the words that follow, for the letter continues: But no more of these dismals.'

Yet another note on this important subject. In a letter of about a year ago, Mr. Harrison says of a contemporary author: 'He tries me much by his obstinate pessimism,' and again, a month later, he refers to the same writer as being monotonous in gloom.' All this would tend to remove any impression we might have received of general or permanent despondency in regard to Mr. Harrison, even if there were no such evidence as that brought forward on an earlier page of this article.

I may add that his letters abound with pertinent quotations; there are extracts innumerable from half a dozen languages; one letter is written entirely in Latin. Many give evidence of a love of nature, and reveal a faculty of description that I have not noticed in his published work. In one of these he fills as many as six pages with a picturesque account of the place from which the letter is dated.

Weekly in our churches we pray to be delivered from sudden death. Is this a relic of Roman Catholic belief and practice as embodied for us in the following:

Ah no! in sacred vestments mayst thou stand,
The hallowed taper trembling in thy hand ;
Present the cross before my lifted eye;
Teach me at once-and learn of me-to die,

or again, as in a line or two of Shakespeare:

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd?

Whatever the explanation, we are many of us inclined, I believe, in our day to wish that our end may be sudden or unattended. Such is the desire expressed in one of the best known poems of Matthew Arnold; and he was not frustrated of his desire. Not altogether unlike this was the passing of Frederic Harrison. I am waiting for the call,' he said to me more than once, and the remark was followed by a hope that when the summons came he might be permitted to give it a ready answer. This waiting and readiness are amplified in a letter that I venture

to regard as one of the noblest ever written; I shall quote only the words that apply strictly to the foregoing: 'Take me straight off to rest.'

It is possible that the great and striking personality I have attempted to describe, and whose removal by death is now universally mourned, will be remembered too little for his excursions into the domains of history, or belles lettres, or politics, or even social reform; it is just a little likely (but of this I am not sure) that his very universality as a writer will swamp a more definite and distinguished literary renown. Be this as it may, he was not only a maker of books: he had a voice of potent authority, and he probably wrote more pamphlets and occasional articles-invaluable most of them-than any other in his generation. And to this I am tempted to add : Might we not with some degree of seriousness speak of him as an unofficial Prose Laureate, the Prose Laureate of half a century? And what a half-century! None other, surely, has ever been in greater need of such a spokesman; one may say without risk of exaggeration that it has been more crowded with changes, discoveries, energies and agonies than almost any hundred years that went before.

But now, by way of a more general appreciation, let me add that, in my opinion, the writings of Frederic Harrison faithfully reflect his character: both have set truth above party, or class, or bigotry; in both we discern a wisdom that ripened during two generations; in neither is there any taint of a vulgar ambition, and I believe that both his books and his memory enshrine one noble endeavour: to say and do the right. I also believe that he now takes his place among those kings of thought 'who' (the eloquence is Shelley's) of the past are all that cannot pass away.' Further, he is the last, or nearly the last, of those great souls, not a few of them octogenarians or nearly such, who were the glory of our Victorian literature. I often contrast these veterans with the Elizabethans whom (if I am not too fanciful) the gods seem to have loved overmuch, since so many of them died young; and the same may be said with yet greater truth of the brilliant band of writers who appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Frederic Harrison, on the other hand, was a familiar figure in English life and letters for more than fifty years, and, as we have seen, he entered almost every field of human mentality: religion, poetry, criticism, history, the law, politics, industry, sociology; and this list is far from being complete.

I have put religion at the head of my list, for, as I venture to believe, it is the mainspring whether of his life or his philosophy.

'Very few things—no good things—are possible without religion.' This is one of the most emphatic of his utterances, and there are others to the same effect. Surely we may say of Frederic Harrison that there has been more virtue and less vice through his writing, and as surely we may add, through his living; each, as I must repeat, seems to have been inspired throughout by noble endeavour, and few of us will deny to either some measure of lofty accomplishment. If he could not always lead, he at least pointed the way, and if I had to select a few words that should stand as the motto of his life and work (they might even serve for an inscription on his urn), they would be a line from the poet he was accustomed to rank so highly among his contemporaries : Let be thy wail, and help thy fellow men.

MORTON LUCE.

P.S.-I should wish to offer my acknowledgments to any reviews from which I may have made quotations in the foregoing.

1923

FALLACIES OF INDUSTRIALISM

How is the dry rot that has overtaken politics and industry to be explained? This is the sphinx riddle that presents itself to modern civilisation which we must answer or perish. The usual answer is that it is due to the love of money and power, and up to a certain point this is true. But it does not express the whole truth. For such an explanation fails to explain why a decline in the moral standards of politics and industry should coincide with a widespread moral revival in the community. In spite of appearances to the contrary, such a revival, I am persuaded, is taking place. In support of this contention I would urge that the Socialist movement is only to be understood on the assumption that it is a moral revival. The Socialist is a man in moral revolt against the corruption and inhumanities of our industrial system, and he accepts the economic theories of Socialism as convenient formula to embody his moral protests, rarely pausing to consider whether the formulæ are tenable in themselves or not. For intellectual comprehension of their own theories is rare among Socialists, most of them' swallowing their theories without tasting them.' When they do taste them they spew them out. How else, except upon the assumption that Socialism is a moral revival, are we to explain the fact that the movement gathers strength in spite of the discrediting of its successive theories?

The recognition of this fact leads us to search for a more proximate cause than the love of money and power for the corruption and demoralisation that have overtaken politics and industry. In every period of history there have been men who worshipped money and power, but never since the Christian era began have they had things so entirely their own way as is the case to-day; for at other times there were always powerful influences to keep them in check. But this is so no longer, and the reason for this is, I think, to be found in the total loss with so many of religious and political faith on the one hand and of personal independence on the other. If men are to act with courage and decision, they must be possessed of religious or political convictions, and, except in rare instances, of some measure of personal independence. Each of these is in different