Some persons who condemn patriotism are simply lacking in public spirit, or their loyalty is monopolised by some fad or 'cause,' which is a poor substitute for love of country. The man who has no prejudices in favour of his own family and his own country is generally an unamiable creature. So we need not condemn Molière for saying, 'L'ami du genre humain n'est pas du tout mon fait,' nor Brunetière for declaring that 'Ni la nature ni l'histoire n'ont en effet voulu que les hommes fussent tous frères.' But French Neo-catholicism, a bourgeois movement directed against all the ideas of 1789,' seems to have adopted the most ferocious kind of chauvinism. M. Paul Bourget wrote the other day in the Echo de Paris,' This war must be the first of many, since we cannot exterminate sixty-five million Germans in a single campaign!' The women and children too! This is not the way to revive the religion of Christ in France.

The practical question for the future is whether there is any prospect of returning, under more favourable auspices, to the unrealised ideal of the Middle Ages -an agreement among the nations of Europe to live amicably under one system of international law and right, binding upon all, and with the consciousness of an intellectual and spiritual unity deeper than political divisions. The nations are the citizens of humanity,' said Mazzini; and so they ought to be. Some of the omens are favourable. Militarism has dug its grave. The great powers increased their armaments till the burden became insupportable, and have now rushed into bankruptcy in the hope of shaking it off. In prehistoric times the lords of creation were certain gigantic lizards, protected by massive armour-plates which could only be carried by a creature thirty to sixty feet long. Then they died, when neither earth, air, nor water could support them any longer. Such must be the end of the European nations, unless they learn wisdom. The lesson will be brought home to them by Transatlantic competition. The United States of America had already, before this war, an initial advantage over the disunited states of Europe, amounting to at least 10 per cent. on every contract; after the war this advantage will be doubled. It remains to be seen whether the next generation will honour the debts which

we are piling up. Disraeli used to complain of what he called 'Dutch finance,' which consists in 'mortgaging the industry of the future to protect property in the present.' Pitt paid for the great war of a hundred years ago in this manner; after a century we are still groaning under the burden of his loans. We may hear more of the iniquity of Dutch finance' when the democracies of the next generation have a chance of repudiating obligations which, as they will say, they did not contract. However that may be, international rivalry is plainly very bad business; and there are great possibilities in the Hague Tribunal, if, and only if, the signatories to the conference bind themselves to use force against a recalcitrant member. The conduct of Germany in this war has shown that public opinion is powerless to restrain a nation which feels strong enough to defy it.

Another cause which may give patriots leisure to turn their thoughts away from war's alarms is that the 'swarming' period of the European races is coming to an end. The unparalleled increase of population in the first three quarters of the 19th century has been followed by a progressive decrease in the birth-rate, which will begin to tell upon social conditions when the reduction in the death-rate, which has hitherto kept pace with it, shall have reached its natural limit. Europe with a stationary population will be in a much happier condition; and problems of social reform can then be tackled with some hope of success. Honourable emulation in the arts of life may then take the place of desperate competition and antagonism. Human lives will begin to have a positive value, and we may even think it fair to honour our saviours more than our destroyers. The effects of past follies will then soon be effaced; for nations recover much more quickly from wars than from internal disorders. External injuries are rapidly cured; but 'those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves.' The greatest obstacle to progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism. The true patriot will keep his eye fixed on this, and will dread as the state's worst enemies those citizens who at the top and bottom of the social scale have no other ambition than to hang on and suck the life-blood of the nation. Great things may be hoped from the new science

of eugenics, when it has passed out of its tentative and experimental stage.

In the distant future we may reasonably hope that patriotism will be a sentiment like the loyalty which binds a man to his public school and university, an affection purged of all rancour and jealousy, a stimulus to all honourable conduct and noble effort, a part of the poetry of life. It is so already to many of us, and has been so to the noblest Englishmen since we have had a literature. If Henry V's speech at Agincourt is the splendid gasconade of a royal freebooter, there is no false ring in the scene where John of Gaunt takes leave of his banished son; nor in Sir Walter Scott's 'Breathes there a man with soul so dead,' etc. 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.' We cannot quite manage to substitute London for Zion in singing psalms, though there are some places in England-Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridgewhich do evoke these feelings. These emotions of loyalty and devotion are by no means to be checked or despised. They have an infinite potency for good. In spiritual things there is no conflict between intensity and expansion. The deepest sympathy is, potentially, also the widest. He who loves not his home and country which he has seen, how shall he love humanity in general which he has not seen? There are, after all, few emotions of which one has less reason to be ashamed than the little lump in the throat which the Englishman feels when he first catches sight of the white cliffs of Dover.

W. R. INGE.

Art. 5.-THE WAR AND INDIAN WHEAT.

FOR a long time to come economists will probably look back to the years beginning with 1914 as an era of bold experiments. Already we see, either in actual operation or at least the subject of practical discussion, State organisation of production, State regulation of wages and of profits, provision of public capital for private enterprise, manipulation of the excise revenue-system as a sumptuary law-all of them measures which historians may associate with the distant past, which enthusiasts have dreamed of as short cuts to their own particular millennium, but which economists of the orthodox type have usually been content to regard as exploded heresies, valuable only as affording practice in dialectic to the junior students of their classes. Among the economic experiments already in progress few are bolder and few are of greater interest than the undertaking of the Indian Government to regulate the price of food throughout the vast area of the Dependency. No final judgment can yet be pronounced on this enterprise, but, while awaiting the verdict of results, it is worth while to examine the conditions in which action has been considered to be necessary, and the methods by which it is hoped to attain success.

The regulation of the price of food is no novel conception to Indian statesmen. At recurring periods throughout the centuries cheap food has been an ideal of government; and the stern adherence of recent British rulers to the policy of free trade in the necessaries of life has been almost incomprehensible to those classes of Indians who are accustomed to express an opinion on public affairs. These classes have given a cordial welcome to the emergency-measures that have now been adopted; and it is possible that when the emergency is over their attitude may prove an inconvenient obstacle to the complete resumption of the traditional British policy. Some idea of the way in which the Indian mind regards such questions can be obtained by glancing at a precedent which has been described in detail by a contemporary chronicler.

Rather more than six hundred years ago Alá-ud-din, the powerful Emperor of Northern India, found that the

prices of food and other necessaries were inconveniently high, so much so that he could not maintain an army adequate to resist the hostile forces pressing on his north-western frontier. To the western mind the position might have called for an increase in taxation or for economies in internal expenditure; Alá-ud-din and his advisers, after careful deliberation, chose what was to them the natural course, a reduction in the price of necessaries, so that a larger army could be maintained with the funds available. The administrative measures adopted with this object were exhaustive. The area

sown with food-crops was regulated in accordance with requirements; a large proportion of the revenue was collected in grain; and an extensive system of storage and control over transport enabled the supply of grain to be regulated from season to season. The supply being thus adapted to the demand, temporary and local fluctuations in the markets could be prevented by an adequate intelligence-system and by punishment for any evasion of the regulations. The Emperor insisted on the avoidance of severe and tyrannical' punishments, and apparently attempts to raise prices were repressed only by minor penalties such as fines and flogging; but for more insidious practices, such as giving short weight, the delinquent dealer was mulcted in an equal weight of flesh, 'cut from his haunches and thrown down before his eyes' in market overt. The chronicler adds that the certainty of this punishment prevented what he calls knavish tricks, and even secured extra weight for purchasers. These measures were successful during the remainder of the Emperor's life; but, as has so often been the case in Indian history, measures died with the man, the next Emperor failed to maintain the regulations, and prices were once more left to the unrestricted action of the market.

The Government of Lord Hardinge has now decided to revive in part the policy of Alá-ud-din; and it is fortunate for the administration that the present economic situation in India admits of a simpler procedure than was found necessary in the earlier case. The difference is due to the modern development of the export trade in wheat, the existence of which ensures that in ordinary years the country produces