Elizabethan low-comedy incongruity with the noble aspirations with which they set out. A youth-typically in one of the communes-awoke before his elder bed-fellow, and seeing a figured waistcoat among his companion's clothes, desired it, took it, and would not part with it. And indeed on the principle of non-resistance to which the commune was committed he was right. There was no meum and tuum. He wanted the waistcoat-and the commune disbanded. Men may indeed agree upon a modus vivendi by which to adjust a conflict of desires, but without the support of force such agreements are, simply, without force when men don't agree.

The case of government is only a degree less obvious. We do indeed grant it but reluctantly. The policeman as he saunters down his beat seems too feeble in the presence of the mass of citizens who throng by him to do more than symbolize an empty convention, relic of an older time when burghers were indeed ruled by the armed will of their over-lords. But when we inquire into the sanctions behind the laws we make, we find nothing but that sauntering policeman. Our child-labour conventions, marriage-law conventions, socialistic conventions come together, express their aspirations, appeal to our reason, touch our sympathies; but they adjourn and children go on working in factories, Reno flourishes, poverty and riches live on side by side. Such conventions have all the power that nonresistance can give them. And yet who that does not obey them now would obey them then when non-resistance was the principle of government? There would be no such thing as law but only the airy dreams of legislators.

It is perhaps a hard saying, but it has to be said, that government is nothing but the imposition by force of the will of the stronger upon the weaker. Whether the murderer, the swindler, the robber may not be absolutely right, no one knows. We deal with them because we are stronger than they and they have violated our opinions. Democracy seems at first sight to be a relaxation of this law. The popular voice in framing statutes and the "common consent" of the governed veil the appearance of imposition. And yet in fact democracy is a fuller expression of it than other forms of government—a franker admission that the laws are but the conventions of the stronger majority, without illusion of divine right or even of a closer approximation to absolute truth. No government-democracy, monarchy,

tyranny has any other sanction for its laws than the force it can muster. Nothing, as Tolstoi saw, is consistent with the ideal of peace but anarchy.

The difficulty-if now that we have the implications before us I may venture a criticism on the basis of stubborn reality and the moral reason-lies in the bare fact that if nothing but anarchy is consistent with the ideal of peace, nothing is so inconsistent as anarchy with the reality of peace. Demonstrations lie all about us. We have tried anarchy and we have not been able to bear it. The history of the West illustrates how quickly men find utter freedom intolerable. To Tolstoi, indeed, such illustrations were abhorrent; they dragged the purity of truth down to the dust. Strangely enough the realistic novelist of War and Peace and Anna Karenina would grant to reality no authority at all in his philosophy. But for us, who are trying to find a way through the dust itself, it takes but a glance at our own peaceful neighbourhood or quiet profession to know that men do disagree and trample on the hopes and dreams and beliefs of others; and that without government to express authoritatively the collective sense of the community and suppress its grosser violations we should be farther from peace than we are now for all our occasional wars.

If compromise with reality is of the essence of the moral law, however, it seems only rational to ask why it should not be possible to halt at a point between government and property on the one hand and war on the other. But if we proceed with the moral reason such a point affords us no resting-place. For if we have committed ourselves to the right of government to administer its laws with all necessary force upon its unarmed citizens, we could hardly logically hesitate at their enforcement upon armed citizens or upon armed aliens within the frontiers. If it should draw the line there we should have a government abdicating in favour of any man with a weapon. And we should have anarchy on the morrow. Government is, in practice, impossible without admitting the principle of war.

There is, it is true, a justifiable plea for an ideal that it is an ideal, distant, perhaps unattainable, and yet a thing to have in mind, to strive toward however slowly. And it is, I take it, in this sense that most of those who cling to the ideal of peace still give it their allegiance. But an incidental weakness lies. at the base of such an attitude. We have indeed objected that

utter intransigence belongs to the mathematical rather than to the moral reason. But if we look closely at this particular case we shall find, even from the moral point of view, that unless it is intransigent it is nothing. We do not ordinarily say that the least transgression nullifies a moral ideal; we try again and again after repeated failures. But the ideal of peace does not afford us such a chance. War has this difference from other transgressions that it is in itself a dire extremity, a last resort. Our instinctive love of peace ordinarily suffices. The temptation to war comes normally but once in a lifetime. As a consequence the ideal must work at just that one moment or it has no use at all. If it fails once in a lifetime it leaves the situation just as it is. If it is not intransigent, therefore, it is indeed nothing. We can not gradually strive for it. We must take it or leave it. A new generation is on our heels, for it too there can be no compromise.

It is possible, indeed, to abandon the ideal as such, and to look for permanent peace through the intensification of that love of peace that has already reduced war to an occasion of once in a lifetime. If this seems the most rational of all attitudes, it is, at the same time, I dare say, the most insidious, the most weighted with dire consequences, threatening the constitution of the moral world itself. It contains a flaw that grows under examination into an appreciable breach with the very morality it sets out to serve. Not that some wars may not be averted by calm reflection and the love of peace. And not that arbitration may not now and again tide over moments of unwise passion. All that goes without saying. But to commit oneself to the hope for permanent peace is to belittle the importance of moral ideas themselves.

For the simple, clear implication of such a hope is that it is better to let falsehood, injustice, every form of wrong prevail than to lift a hand against them. It is a protest against holding out for right to the last ditch. It says with finality that right is not worth fighting for. Better see one's country overrun, his home destroyed, his family violated, his liberty taken away, than die resisting to the utmost. More broadly still it is a protest against the only effective tenure that right and justice and truth have in the world. For such ideas have their only existence in men's convictions. If they lived anywhere else, as knowledge lives not only in men's memories but also in lasting

records, they might have a chance of survival when convictions slacken. But they do not. Men's convictions are their existence. And to protest against the extremity of conviction is to protest against the only life they have. It is to put the tenuous chance for their survival in the world into sudden disrepute.

There emerges a paradox which perhaps may best be seen in the dryness of a diagram. Little by little as civilization has fought its slow way upward, it has grown by accumulating, now here and now there, bodies of common opinion. Since nature itself provides no standards of truth and right, each accumulation expresses something very precious that comes as near to truth and right as it can attain. The hope for the growth of civilization lies in the chance that those who come nearest, whose agreement embodies the greatest justice and the greatest wisdom, shall maintain themselves and grow in volume and extent. If then the less wise and just should accept the ideal of peace, throw down their defences, and care no more to uphold their foolish opinions, the hope for both civilization and peace would be great indeed. Such a consummation would perhaps have its ironic comment on the wisdom of the ideal, but the logical difficulty would be tolerable in the glory of the event itself. The despair of such a consummation, however, lies in the difficulty of selecting the less wise and just, and getting them to accept the ideal. Only if the ideal were really wise would selection be possible. For then it would be the wise who would accept it, while the others maintained their fighting front. But then not only would the hope of civilization be lost, but also the hope of peace. Only if all should cease to care to defend their sense of right and justice would peace at last prevail. But then right and justice would have foregone their living chance.

University of Nebraska.

S. B. GASS.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL AND THE PAINTER

I am going to be very platitudinous, but I make no apologies. It is so often difficult to distinguish a platitude from a disagreeable truth or a paradox from a lie, that I take refuge in the hope that what I have here to say is platitudinous because it is true and, perhaps, disagreeable, and not because it is in everybody's mind like the tune of a musical comedy or a slang phrase. Platitudes, I have noticed, are like the Bible and Karl Marx, often quoted and sneered at, but little studied or applied. They are exactly like bread at the table; nothing tastes quite right without it, but we dislike to eat it ungarnished. Now platitudes are the bread of discourse, the staff of its life; and in the discussion of works of art one of the most recurrent of them during the last decade is the observation that criticism, like the arts which are its subject-matter, is an expression of the temper of the age which it seeks to guide. Criticism gives voice to the age's prevailing mood, its institutional organization, its centrally animating ideal. If the casual observer finds that criticism has changed from an art to a profession, if he finds either that the critic looks backward rather than forward or that he is a propagandist and missionary for novelties, if he finds that he has tended to limit his criticism either to the allusive expression of feelings which works of art evoke in him, or to the learned analysis of the artist's technique and treatment of his theme, he finds these things because the arts have themselves become mere expressions of private feeling or individual skill, because the artist has learned to regard himself as an individual merely, because the arts no longer rise from a common ground of vision or express a common ideal. And where a poet's or a painter's work is the utterance of a bare, private mood, a symbol in an autobiography, which may or may not have meaning to another man, the only thing that can be common to all men is not what is said, but how it is said. Manner will be far more important than matter, and the critic who seeks to be truly objective will hardly consider anything else. His discussion tends to interest what readers he has in manner, and by a natural, inevitable step, to drive