in the conception of peace imposed upon ill-disposed nations by means of a piece of diplomatic machinery. The League of Nations will only effect its purpose if it is one, but only one, among many co-ordinated factors, employed by common consent for the accomplishment of spiritual purposes. If it stands alone, it will not stand long. Moreover, its function must be carefully defined. The League is primarily a static conception. All attempts to invest it with a dynamic function, while the machinery for discharging it are lacking, will merely in the inevitable event add to the wars which would normally occur.

The League is a promising device for perpetuating and consolidating the status quo. The importance of this function will vary concomitantly with the degree in which the particular status quo coincides with geographical equity. Obviously the mere maintenance of a territorial settlement may be vital for humanity, or may be highly detrimental. The League of Nations can hardly include among its activities the creation of new nations, and, indeed, is rather calculated to act as a deterrent thereto, though it must be admitted that birth control in this respect may have grave results. In recasting the map, the League must, I fear, inevitably prove the most debatable form of debating society. Even for the narrow function of preserving a peacewhether good or bad-it will need the unremitting solicitude of every national constituent. If it is composed of materialistic Powers it will hardly, except by accident, achieve idealistic ends.

In the best circumstances it may fail; how can it possibly succeed in the worst? As a piece of magic for the prevention of wars between nations following selfish policies, it is bound to be a deception, wherever indeed it does not happen to be an engine of tyranny.

To ensure success within the limits imposed alike by its universality and its material impotence, the nations comprising it must do their bit,' that is considerably more than hitherto.

The spectacle of the Great Powers scrambling for concessions and, at each failure to obtain these, preaching the League of Nations and the open door is not exactly encouraging, however it may be reconciled with the fashionable expedient of compromise. Then, too, not only must the peoples be of goodwill, but they must be reasonably well informed of, and conversant with, each other's affairs. At present they are not. Leaving foreign policy to the League of Nations is one of the most disastrous forms of wait and see.

The result, indeed, is a foregone conclusion. The disinterestedness of the European democracies in the world drama now being unfolded before their eyes will be the measure of the lifelessness of the combination. Just as you cannot get blood from a stone, VOL. XCIV-No. 557

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so it may well be found impracticable to avoid the shedding of blood by purely mechanical methods.

You may gain the whole world for the League of Nations, and yet endanger the world soul.

The technique of peace-important though it undoubtedly is— must be superimposed upon a spiritual training of the nations. Such an association can only serve its immediate purpose, as a preservative of particular settlements, if there exists an active public opinion favourable to these settlements, and convinced upon rational grounds of their justice.

The British public is unfortunately sinking into a sleepy sickness upon all outside questions. The Press should resist this fatal disorder, but is, I fear, the most active agent in promoting it. Crescit dira hydrops sibi indulgens.'

The public at the moment greedily absorbs every pretext for persisting in this mischievous lethargy. Wars are not to be avoided by what Lord Curzon has called the policy of skedaddle; otherwise the League of Nations and all other elaborate machinery for settling obstinate disputes might soon become superfluous. When, too, we have, humanly speaking, averted the danger of war, we have doubtless mastered the greatest impediment to progress, but we can hardly rest content with a negative achievement, even of this magnitude.

It must be remembered that the banishment of war is not necessarily the inauguration of the reign of justice. It must be clear that we have not avoided war merely by imposing the will of the Great Powers upon the small ones, but by an even-handed and impartial application of principle to the solution of all problems, big and little.

I have said that the League is primarily a trustee of treaties and a guarantor of their fixity.

It follows from this that it cannot be indifferent to the character of those treaties, that is, to the quality of the trust of which it is the appointed guardian. It must act as the keeper of the conscience of Europe and, when necessary, apply a muchneeded stimulus to that dormant faculty. Is the League winning through to a permanent peace of justice? It must be admitted that there are already certain grounds for criticism, as well as for modified optimism.

If such events as the burning of Smyrna leave the League of Nations cold, if the Sèvres Treaty can be torn up and the League of Nations consent, without a protest, to adopt a substitute, we shall be well advised to write off exaggerated anticipations of a moral lead from that quarter.

Indeed, if, as seems likely, Turkey, Germany and Bolshevist Russia become full members of the League in the near future, we

shall be lucky if that body can only be reproached with flagrant acts of omission. One may thereafter be tempted to inquire, 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?'

The prevention of war, indeed, is scarcely more important than the method of its prevention.

Nor when we have prevented war without arousing undue resentment have we reached the end of our task.

It is of great importance to consider what use we shall make, at least in our own Empire, of the time saved from killing, so that, immersed in the gentle arts of racing and prize-fighting, we may not merely be engaged in killing time instead.

It is a matter of grave importance that the public mind should concentrate on serious interests.

The great need of the hour is to reawaken in a generation recovering slowly from the shock of war a belief in the utility of human reasoning. There is as yet a profound disinclination to submit thereto any problem outside the domain of politics and law.

The discovery that not alone the forces of Nature, but the totality of the universe, are susceptible of rational explanation— this no doubt will act as a further shock to a word-weary age.

The deeper meanings of life which came home to the citizens of ancient Athens and Sparta are now thought to be too profound for the Londoner. They are left to the obscurantist scholar who is only happy when he is out of his depth.

The contribution of simple citizens to the problem of solving the mysteries of existence is confined to a more or less petulant non possumus. We may look in vain for a dialectical Einstein who will be able to prove to the many, in simple language, the relativity of all branches of knowledge and the consequent profit

great argument,' of which the Persian poet sang, and of which the modern youth hears too little. It is to be feared that dialectics are associated in the popular mind rather with divagation from the truth than with its pursuit.

Why, however, should we not recapture some of the enthusiasm of classical times for the work of the human mind, of which they then knew so little, yet thought so much?

The discoveries of the modern world place us in the position of being able to attack the old problems of being and becoming with all the accumulated experience of the past, and with the laws of Nature acting as allies instead of unknowable enemies.

Our fellow-countrymen, therefore, must be talked out of their reserved attitude to human thought.

There is, surely, nothing more discreditable than the present humble estimate by man of the faculty which distinguishes him from the lower animals. Religion and philosophy are twin sisters whose estrangement can only be desired by their common

foes. Indeed, it is only by the reconciling touch of the philosopher that adequate use may be made of the spiritual factors which are bringing them together.

Similarly, it is in all probability only by renewed recourse to philosophy that an adequate refutation of the extremer kinds of political theory may be accomplished.

Much is rightly being made of the choice which the country will have to make between ordered progress and chaos dictated from abroad. We cannot hope that the plausible, but calamitous, fallacies of Communism can be effectively exposed to an electorate who regard any election, whatever the issue, as merely a sporting event, decidedly less exciting than a Cup-tie final! I am convinced that the time has come to attempt a more fundamental education of the people, directed to a re-establishment of basic axioms governing the conduct of the modern community and flowing from some accepted theory of the goal of human endeavour. We should then be freed from the haunting fear that some claptrap appeal at a future General Election may suddenly induce our electorate to commit an unpremeditated hari-kari. A growth of spirituality would certainly be accompanied by an increase of fellow-feeling with other nations. It cannot, for example, be necessary to avoid contact, in order to avoid quarrels, with recent allies.

Still less is it desirable to refuse the sympathy which before the war was seldom withheld by the British peoples to suffering races in distant lands. The Moslem world has recently set us a notable example in religious unity. The persecution of Christians in Turkey and Russia should arouse Western Christians to the realisation that, if Christianity be stamped out in those countries with the acquiescence of Europe, it can hardly survive as a world religion.

Happily, there are signs that materialism will not in the end prevail, and the sharp reaction against the horrors of religious tyranny in Russia may be the prelude to a renaissance of Christian solidarity elsewhere.

Certainly the ideal of a world union of democracies presupposes a common good for all nations which can be reconciled with the fair claims and ideals of each.

Religion has the same message, of which, however, the massed forces of self-interest are, for the time, preventing the deliverance.

An insulated Christianity, however, which, through the sterilising effects of self-indulgence and party politics, fails to affirm with no uncertain voice the inviolability of Christian freedom, wherever it is assailed, can scarcely escape the reproach of decay.

R. B. C. SHeridan.

MALAYA AND THE EMPIRE

THE Malay Peninsula is so little known in England that letters even for Singapore, one of the world's largest ports, are often addressed to India. More than once I have been asked by dons at a learned University if I were returning to 'the Malay,' a phrase applicable, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, only to the members of a race predominating in Malacca and the Eastern Archipelago.' The lexicographers responsible for that definition were apparently following the Continental usage of naming the whole of the Malay Peninsula after its most historic town, though English writers with local knowledge have long preferred the hybrid word 'Malaya.'

Politically the 52,000 square miles of the Peninsula under British rule or protection are divided into three parts, with names that are a terribly prosaic label to introduce the curious to a beautiful land. There is the Crown colony of the Straits Settlements, made up of the island of Singapore, the island of Penang, with Province Wellesley and the Dindings, and the old-world settlement of Malacca. There are the Federated Malay States of Perak, Selangor, Negri Sembilan and Pahang, which came under British protection only in the 'seventies and 'eighties of the last century. And there are the Unfederated Malay States of Johore, Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Trengganu. Ever since Raffles acquired the island of Singapore from the overlords of Johore a hundred years ago British relations with that State have been close and friendly, culminating in 1914 with its Ruler's request for a British officer as general adviser. Rights of suzerainty and protection over the other four unfederated States were transferred by Siam to Great Britain in 1909.

So huge is our Empire that in the streets of its capital the ordinary educated man would not recognise a Malay if he encountered one. A few individuals are better informed. A Malay rajah, who astonished me when I first met him twenty years ago by quoting Gray's Elegy, the Bible and a French proverb in the course of the evening, told me once with smiling relish how he had attended some reception in London attired in ceremonial silks with a gold-sheathed dagger in his belt and had overheard

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