'But now, though sorrow be ever fresh, sorrow

Is tender as love; it knows

That of love it was born, and Love with the shining eyes The hard way chose.'

Other noteworthy poems are 'The Deportation' with its subdued yet striking realism, 'The Arras Road,' 'Cambrai, 'An Incident at Cambrai,' and 'Fetching the Wounded' with its Rembrandt-like night effects. It is not for nothing that the author was for months a stretcherbearer in a French clearing station. In some of these the metre literally throbs with war rhythms that even more than the words recall to the reader the very mood and sensations of the scenes the poet is depicting. Here he has, time after time, let himself go with the happiest results, notably in Gallipoli,' which moves with the freedom and sweep of a Pindaric ode, while in 'Stonehenge' the static grandeur of the unchanging past and the bustle and vigour of the young artillery horsemen is most happily reproduced in the varying rhythms. And finally there is one grim little poem in vers libres entitled 'Hunger' which appears to us a brilliant success in that most difficult of all 'genres':

'I come among the people like a shadow.

I sit down by each man's side.

'None sees me, but they look on one another,
And know that I am there.

'My silence is like the silence of the tide
That buries the playground of children;

'Like the deepening of frost in the slow night,
When birds are dead in the morning.

'Armies trample, invade, destroy,

With guns roaring from earth and air.

'I am more terrible than armies,

I am more feared than cannon.

'Kings and chancellors give commands;
I give no commands to any ;

'But I am listened to more than kings
And more than passionate orators.

'I unswear words and undo deeds.

Naked things know me.

'I am the first and the last to be felt of the living.
I am Hunger.'

Laurence Binyon, as we suggested at the outset, is a nany-sided poet. The Death of Adam,' 'The Death of ristram' and 'Penthesilea' all testify to his power to evivify and recreate the past, just as 'London Visions ears witness to his power to show the poetry underlying the commonest and most sordid lives of to-day. His upreme sense of beauty is illustrated by the Dryad,' hile his feeling for external nature is exemplified by Bab-lock-hythe,' by Château Gaillard,' and many pasages in London Visions.' All this poetry represents very wide sympathy, ever sure, though at times it might be more intense. The underlying emotion is, in ct, unduly sacrificed to a penchant for reverie and deflexion, 'sicklied o'er,' one might say, 'with the pale ast of thought,' if the expression were not too strong. ut, when this reflectiveness is quickened, as it were, by the breaking-through of the fires of passion below, then, 3 we have seen in the analysis of such poems as 'Sirione,' 'The Mirror,' The Secret' and others, the poet hieves a rare clairvoyance and insight into the heart things, extending to mere animate nature as in 'The iger Lily,' or even to inanimate things as in 'The atues,' and the description of the rock in ‘Malham ove.' He becomes in fact the seer, with a real message deliver, even if, as we see, it is of a somewhat metaysical nature.

And, lastly, in his war poems he becomes the mouthece of English culture under the duress of war, intereting its deepest emotions and giving as it were the 1swer of its truest and best to the Sphinx-like riddle of eath, rising in his supremest moments to the spokesanship of the whole nation in those two immortal Dems, 'To Women' and 'For the Fallen,' while his rse grows ever more subtle and plastic as it becomes ore and more attuned to the infinite modulations of ffering and anguish which form as it were the minor y of the music of war.

We have not infrequently heard Binyon compared

to Wordsworth. There is obviously in both a common bent towards meditation and reflexion and a desire to explore and interpret the mystical arcana of Nature. But the parallel may be carried still further. 'The Four Years' probably finds its closest prototype in literature in the Political Sonnets of the Lake Poet. Each is, in fact, a sort of intermittent diary of some of the chief psychological moments through which the English nation has passed in the two greatest wars in its history. It is interesting indeed to compare the supreme Leit-motiv in each case. In Wordsworth's poems the chief stress is laid on liberty. In Mr Binyon's it is rather the pathetic side which is uppermost. The spirit of the former is the spirit of the French Revolution. The spirit of the latter is that of Stoicism tempered by Pity. Both poets in fact, in their best war poems, have been the true inter preters of their time and their nation, and both have thereby secured for themselves immortality.

But if Wordsworth, especially the Wordsworth of the earlier period, may be regarded under certain aspects as a prototype of Binyon, the later Wordsworth may also serve with his growing prolixity as a warning example to the latter. The French have a hard saying, 'Qui ne sait pas se borner, ne sait jamais écrire.' Binyon writes with such apparent facility and abundance, that one feels at times the need for concision and compression. His failing is not Dryden's neglect to blot, for the workmanship is uniformly good, but a neglect to eliminate not so much the superfluous as the superabundant. The poet, as Pindar learnt early, must not sow from the sack.

CLOUDESLEY BRERETON.

Art. 10.-RAILWAY NATIONALISATION.

Railway Transportation: Its History and its Laws. By Arthur T. Hadley. Putnam, 1886. The Case for Railway Nationalisation. By Emil Davies. (Bibliography.) Collins' Nations Library, 1913. The Case against Railway Nationalisation. By E. A. Pratt. (Bibliography.) Collins' Nations Library, 1913. Railway Working during the War. [Cmd. 147.] 1919. Report of the Royal Commission to enquire into Railways and Transportation in Canada. Ottawa, 1917. Historical Sketch of Government Ownership of Railthe roads in Foreign Countries. By W. M. Acworth. Washington, D.C., May, 1917.

O country has ever nationalised its railways as the sult of deliberately weighing the respective advantages ad disadvantages of private and public ownership. elgium, soon after its separation from Holland in 1830, as led to decide for State ownership mainly by the fear st its railways should come under the control of Dutch pital. Prussia in the early days built State railways serve the poor provinces to the east of Berlin, because ivate investors were not prepared to build them. After

70, Bismarck nationalised the whole of the lines for vo main reasons, of which the foremost was military ad the second the desire to establish State control over important factor in the national life. Switzerland quired its railways in 1898; and again, as in Belgium, e main reason was that the control of the principal mpanies was passing into foreign hands. The bulk the Italian railways were inherited from the various ates that were absorbed into United Italy; but in 1885, ter an elaborate investigation, the Government leased I the lines to three companies for a périod of sixtyree years, with a break at the end of each twenty ars. During the whole currency of the lease there ere constant disputes betwen the lessor and the lessee, Il finally, being unable to obtain a satisfactory revision terms, the Government, suddenly and not without luctance, cut the knot that it had failed to untie, and 1905 assumed possession, as by the provisions of the ase it was entitled to do. In 1907 Japan followed suit,

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partly for military reasons, and partly because the terms of the concessions prevented the Government from making the reduction in rates which was regarded as necessary in the general interest of the country. Finally, C in 1908, yielding to the persistent agitation of the Etatistes, M. Clemenceau promised to nationalise the Western Railway of France. The majority of the Chamber, excluding, however, the bulk of the representa tives of the districts affected, approved. The Chambers of Commerce-in France they are official bodies-of every town in the country of more than third-rate importance protested. The Senate held out for six months, but finally, by a majority of three only, submitted to M. Clemenceau's threat that he would resign, if he were Si not permitted to fulfil his promise. And, while in all the Pr countries mentioned (with the exception of Belgium, which before the war was seriously considering the pro priety of abandoning State railways after seventy years' experience), the policy of national ownership had, speak ing generally, the support of public opinion, in France it was promptly recognised that the change was not for the better. Before the war it used commonly to be said that the experience of State management of the Western Railway had postponed any discussion of the extension of the policy for a generation.

If it be true, as a matter of history, that nations do not decide to nationalise or to refrain from nationalising their railways, on the ground of experience of what other countries have done or are doing in different circumstances, or of what they themselves have done in the past under different conditions, nor yet on the grounds of abstract theory, the usual arguments pro and con become mainly academic and need not be elaborated. They can be found stated at length in numerous books, a few of which are mentioned at the head of this article.

The arguments in favour were summarised in an elaborate exposé des motifs prefixed to the Prussian Expropriation Law of 1878. This summary may be

further summarised thus:

Various abuses are inseparable from private management, namely,

(1) The existence of numerous concerns of doubtful solvency and restricted capacity of service;

Be