hers. If she fails to do so, upon whatever pretext, then her power and influence are gone, and must pass at least to others. In dealing with this grave and heavy trust,' from which the people of England cannot escape, to use her unique economic and geographical position to preserve peace throughout the world, he writes:

'That a maintenance of peace and order everywhere is the chief interest of England herself is obvious. Her life and fortunes depend upon it. She is essentially a settled country, with no ambition still left to satisfy, either in Europe or in any part of the world. She desires no more territory or possessions anywhere. She has no separated community of her own people to redeem from foreign rule. No legacy of distrust, oppression, or thwarted endeavour besets her. It is true to say that she fears no one. She stands serenely in the sea, separated physically from all other peoples; exempt alike from their traditional troubles, hatreds, and ambitions; and pursuing of necessity a destiny quite different in charater from theirs. But at her gates is Europe. And Europe, the smallest of all the continents, is not yet settled at all.'

During the sixty years preceding the Great War the brothers-in-arms in one campaign in Europe became in bewildering succession the bitter foes of the next. The new security thus demanded is, in form, a security against future wars in Europe-a security against the sudden and forcible breaking of treaties there by any one Power, or combination of Powers. If, by means of some politico-legal machinery, a real security can be felt that no infringement of treaty can take place until every conceivable resource of previous consideration and discussion has been exhausted, such machinery must be a matter of profound moment to England, with her overwhelming interest in the preservation every where of order and peace. However promising such machinery should be, the author of The Strength of England' presses for freedom for us to keep in our own hands the decision as to the use of our sea-power, in the event of failure of that machinery to prevent a recourse to arms. In his own words, it is the purpose of his book 'to sketch, so far as possible in simple language, the combined fabric of Law and actual Maritime Power upon which the essential Strength of England depends."

Vol. 248.-No. 491.

The almost unanimous rejection of the Geneva Protocol of 1924 has given us a measure of the public support that is accorded to the principle of keeping our Navy under all conditions under our own control. For an explanation of the 'Maritime Power' factor, in his definition of the strength of England, we must revert to his assumption that this must be sufficiently powerful to maintain an effective control over the surface of the sea, in peace and in war. There we must take account of the point (if the whole surface of the sea is intended) that, according to our latest expert advice, such control depends ultimately upon battleships, of limited radius of action from their bases. In this sense, control over the Western Atlantic and Eastern Pacific has already passed to the United States of America, and control over the China Seas to Japan.

For the Law factor in his stipulation, we turn back to his view that the specific legal right, upon which our distinctive strength in war depends, is the right to condemn, as good prize to the Crown, all the property of our enemy, whenever found by our naval forces upon the high seas. This postulates a definite proclamation, on our part, of our intention to be bound no longer by the Declaration of Paris of 1856, thus reverting to our former power to use our Navy to exert an overwhelming influence over nations that are dependent-as nearly all are now-upon sea-traffic.

While reserving to ourselves the right to decide whether to use our Navy, Commander Bowles demands a complete renunciation of the entirely novel idea that our strength at sea is a matter-from the point of view of the Law governing its use-for the executive handling of Government Departments. The Law must be administered by our Courts of Prize which have never laid, and never can lay, the slightest injury or injustice upon neutral traders:

'To place the power of England at sea, and therefore the continued life and movement of the whole earth upon the waters, into the hands of any single English Government, is to misconceive and degrade the whole character of that power. It is to bring it down from its own high level, with that atmosphere of mere unregulated force, which commonly surrounds the proceedings of war on land.'

In the original sources for historical research collected in Law and Custom of the Sea,' we find much to confirm this view of the super-national, or super-state, attributes of national prize courts. The subject is too comprehensive to be followed up here, and it has been dealt with already in purely legal dissertations. It is, however, desirable to bear in mind the existence of the new Permanent Court of International Justice, which, though established by the League of Nations, is supported by the United States of America, the strongest sea-powerjudged by material tests-in the world. Only an expert could throw much light upon the relative status of this new international tribunal, and national prize courts, as interpreters of the Law of the Sea.

Our investigation into recent writings on the subjects covered by this article is thus taking us into too deep waters. In the opinion of those who, like the Prime Minister, are in a position to probe below the surface of our social life, it seems that we are now experiencing a new economic revolution, and that our future is obscure, but promising. As Mr Trevelyan says, 'Of the future the historian can see no more than others, he can only point like a showman to the things of the past with their manifold and strange message.' Amongst the things of the past that have made for the strength of England, there stand out clearly the value to us of our geographical position at the world-centre of sea-traffic-and of sufficient sea-power to provide for our own security, and also to save other nations, both in their interests and in our own, from the destructive effects of land warfare. In the English Navy and Merchant Service, and in the power of England to command the surface of the roads of the world under the control, not of her own Executive, but of undisputed, general Law, lies the sole hope of peace in the future for a saddened and distracted world.'.

GEORGE ASTON.

* Bowles, 'The Strength of England.'

Art. 5.-GREEK RELIGION.

1. A History of Greek Religion. By Martin P. Nilsson. Oxford University Press, 1925.

2. The Mystery-Religions and Christianity. By the Rev. S. Angus. Murray, 1925.

3. The Worship of Nature.

Vol. I. By Sir James George

Frazer, O.M. Macmillan, 1926.

4. Zeus. A Study in Ancient Religion.

Vols. I and II. By Arthur Bernard Cook. Cambridge University Press, 1925.

5. Greek Hero-Cults and Ideas of Immortality. By Lewis R. Farnell. Oxford University Press, 1921.

THE failure of Greek religion lay in its inability to create a mythology adequate to its own instincts; and the failure is the more marked because that mythology is so exuberant and in many ways so beautiful. The Greeks of the classical period realised the failure themselves, and this contrast of power and weakness has a peculiar fascination for modern scholarship. As far back as we can go in regular history, and further back still, they and their predecessors appear keenly interested both in religion and in mythology; but as soon as our certain records begin their interest becomes at least as much critical and speculative as sympathetic and devotional. This is plain from Homer to Euripides, and after Euripides, while the criticism continues, the power of myth-making dies down; there is little to take its place, and disintegration, as Aristophanes foresaw, proceeds apace till the whole brilliant edifice crumbles to the ground.

Yet the world is always turning back to the gods of Greece for inspiration as well as for delight. This is partly because the leading figures of their Pantheon were created and adorned by imaginative artists, but also because those figures represented great natural forces the force of beauty and love, for example, in Aphrodite and Eros; of mature womanhood in Hera; of virginity in Artemis; of intelligence in Athena; of virile youth in Apollo; of craftmanship in Hephæstus; of war in Ares; of ecstasy in Dionysus; above all, the forces of what we are accustomed to call Nature herself' in

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Zeus the sky-god and in the earth-goddesses Demeter and Persephone, deities presiding over cosmic processes of growth and decay and death and rebirth in the spring. Some authorities, it is true, have spoken of Demeter as though she were merely a corn-goddess, and there is no doubt that her connexion with corn was important; this aspect of her being, indeed, the dominant one in classical times. Her daughter, Persephone, however, is always the queen of the dead, and her own name 'Demeter' is significant. The meaning of 'De,' which occurs separately (in Eschylus,' for example), may be doubtful, but 'Meter must mean 'Mother,' and implies a universal function.

From the time of the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' onwards, these goddesses are not, it is true, the leaders. Already in Homer the foremost divinity is Zeus the sky-god, who could pull the weight, Hephaestus reminds his fellows, of all the other Olympians combined. The passage is humorous, as are many where the Homeric gods appear, but is not the less important; and there are graver verses emphasising the care and wisdom of the Father. It is not only that he gathers the clouds, or puts the winds to sleep, or sends his snow like arrows; he has 'deathless counsels' in his mind; he knows the sorrows of gods and men; he cares for the righteous though he is far away.' Strangers and suppliants are under his protection, and Law, Themis, is his messenger to call the gods together. If we look only at such passages we should take him for a supreme and all-wise'sire of gods and men.' But there is plenty of evidence to be found on the other side. Stress is laid on his helplessness in the face of destiny, his lustfulness, his readiness to deceive, his bickerings with his wife. He cannot be excepted from the famous indictment of Xenophanes, that the gods of Homer had 'every human villainy.' Nor can any of the myths about him compare for touching beauty with the story of Demeter and the daughter whom she lost and found again.

It is not only to us that this story seems one of the e loveliest in classical mythology. The Greeks felt it so themselves. The finest of the Homeric hymns is an embroidery on the theme. Euripides, who criticises almost every other myth, never criticises this. The

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