Opposition, pointed out that at the Defence Conference in London the Admiralty experts had recommended the establishment of fleet units by the Dominions. Australia had readily accepted this recommendation, and her local Navy would take that form. The Canadian proposals, in his opinion, provided for something more than an experiment, and yet did little to give immediate and effective aid to Great Britain. The Naval Service could not possibly be efficient in less than fifteen or twenty years, and a crisis would come in five-probably in three-years. We need not dwell upon the differences between Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Mr. Borden. We have no right to offer advice. Mr. Borden apparently wants a more expensive scheme than Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and would prefer a fleet unit on the ground that the proposed Canadian Navy would not be completely adaptable to the uses of the British Admiralty. In any case, the important fact emerges that the leaders of both the great political parties in Canada wish that their country should take its due part in the naval defence of the Empire. Experience will show whether the Canadian proposal is more or less useful to every one concerned than the Australian plan of maintaining a fleet unit, or the New Zealand plan of providing a "Dreadnought."

It

It is quite impossible now that there should be any return on the part of Great Britain to the principle adopted by the Imperial Defence Committee in 1906. The Imperial Defence Committee then disapproved of the Australian proposal to maintain a local Navy. acted on the advice of the Admiralty, which was to the effect that an efficient Navy is one and indivisible, that small local Navies with independent characteristics could not be readily absorbed into the Royal Navy in an emergency, and that the best assistance which the Dominions could give to the Mother

country would be regular contributions of money. Canada and Australia, in their different degrees, have rejected that advice; and though we quite see the logic of the Admirality point of view, we think on the whole that Canada and Australia have decided wisely. There are two chief objections to the policy of naval tributes. One is that the British taxpayer would be tempted to regard them as made in relief of his own pocket. He would forget that the co-operation of the Colonies in naval defence is intended to make assurance doubly sure. The other is that the Colonists themselves would take infinitely less interest in Imperial defence if they simply put down sums of money to be spent invisibly in Great Britain, instead of having Navies of their own taking shape under their eyes, manned by their own people, and perhaps built in their own yards. In the case of Canada, it appears to be Sir Wilfrid Laurier's actual intention to have the ships built in Canada. At first they probably will not be built so well as they could be built in Great Britain, and the cost, as we have seen, will be greater; but those disadvantages matter little compared with the fact that the Canadians, destined to be a mighty people, have begun thus early to express their sense of nationality in terms of naval power. From the point of view of Great Britain, which must expect to see herself in the distant future outstripped in population and resources by her Colonies, nothing more important than this beginning of a Canadian naval policy can be imagined. We believe that both in Canada and Australia an intelligent opinion will now arise on the problems of naval defence which could not have been created in any other way. Perhaps the complete naturalness of Canadian naval ambition will become more apparent if we compare the situation now with what occurred when the garrisons of British

Regular troops were withdrawn from Canada and Australia. Canada and Australia might have said then that they did not care to go to the trouble of training and maintaining troops of their own, and would prefer to hire British regiments to continue the work of garrisoning the country. Instead of that, they preferred to raise troops appropriate to their peculiar duties. When we look back on those times it would appear to us absurd if the Colonists had come to any other decision. And we feel sure that a hundred years The Spectator.

from now, when a considerable Canadian Navy will be in existence, manned by the splendid seamen who inhabit the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada, Englishmen will wonder that it was proposed that Canadians should pay other sailors to do their work for them. And this brings us to our final, but not the least important, point in favor of local Navies, which is that our total naval strength will be greatly increased by the extension of the shipbuilding resources of the Empire.

The Southern counties, especially those nearest London, have gone heavily against the Government. In the Midlands and West the fight has been doubtful. The Northern, Scottish, and Welsh counties have been overwhelmingly Liberal. The new Parliament is now so nearly complete that we can predict a very large majority of Liberal Freetraders, Labor men, and Irish Nationalists over Tories, Liberal Unionists and Tariff Reformers of various hues. If the Independent Nationalists, who are nominally Home Rulers, but reject Mr. Redmond's leadership, and might more properly be denominated Clericals, are to be considered as likely to vote more often with the Tories than with the Liberals, then the majority may be put at 100 rather than at 120. But although the Government's majority can rightly be described as heterogeneous and composite, there is no likelihood of any serious defection upon any of the main issues presented to the electors; for the Prime Minister and his colleagues asked the country

(1) To pronounce against the claim of the House of Lords to refuse its assent to the Budget, and

(2) To empower the Government to limit the acknowledged right of the Hereditary Chamber to amend or reject any Bill sent up to it by the House of Commons. Mr. Balfour and his colleagues joined issue on both these questions, and further appealed to the country

(1) To vote for Tariff Reform, i.e., a general and protective Customs tariff, and

(2) To oppose any scheme of Home Rule for Ireland.

These secondary issues were, of course, taken up by Liberals and Labor men as well as by Irish Nationalists, and accordingly every elector was dosed with House of Lords literature, Free-trade and Protectionist literature, Budget literature, and Irish Home Rule literature. The Tariff Reformers now declare upon what evidence we know not-that the Irish Nationalists support the Birmingham scheme of Tariff Reform, and hints are already being thrown out in the Daily Mail and elsewhere that the Unionist party is prepared to surrender its convictions upon Home Rule, and, also to accept a scheme for the reform of the House of Lords if the Irish Nationalists will

swallow Tariff Reform. But the Home Rule question was pushed to the front with so much energy at the English elections, particularly in the counties (where the laborers were assured that Home Rule for Ireland meant the seizure of that country by the Germans and the invasion of England on the West as well as the East) that this deal, whether it be suggested by the Daily Mail or the Morning Post, seems to be entirely outside the region of practical politics.

Assuming, however, as we may safely do with Mr. Balfour, that Tariff Reform has again been scotched, so far as the new Parliament is concerned, there is, nevertheless, very grave uncertainty about the political future. We do not pretend, like some of our contemporaries, to be able to predict precisely what course the Cabinet (whose members have all survived the hazards of the ballot box) will decide upon; but having regard to the composition of the majority and to the issues at stake, we are inclined to think that the new Parliament will last either a few weeks or for several years, that it will either bring about great constitutional changes as between the two Chambers on the one hand, and as between Great Britain and Ireland on the other, or that it will be dissolved without performing any legislative work at all. The reasons for this judgment are plain and simple. Both the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor have declared emphatically that the Government will not hold of fice unless it is enabled to deal with the claim of the House of Lords to reject the Budget, and also with its admitted constitutional right to reject any or dinary measure passed by the House of Commons. The only constitutional means by which Mr. Asquith's policy can be carried is the use of the Royal prerogative to create whatever number of peers may be necessary to give the

Government a majority in the hereditary as well as in the popular Chamber. But the King may feel that the judgment of the country is equivocal, even though there is a British as well as an Irish majority in favor of Mr. Asquith's Administration. He might conceivably say, for example, that the successes of the Unionists preclude the idea of any serious constitutional change, and would merely entitle the Government to pass Mr. Lloyd George's Budget into law. We hardly think such an attitude probable; but still it is possible. If so, the Government may resign at once. In that case the King would send for Mr. Balfour, who might either pass the Budget and dissolve, or dissolve immediately. He would probably be forced to dissolve immediately, for if he met Parliament he would almost certainly be overthrown immediately by a vote of "no confidence." The inconveniences of another election without the passage either of last year's Budget or of the Estimates for the coming year are, however, so tremendous that they can hardly even be contemplated. They constitute in our judgment a complete and overwhelming proof that the action of the House of Lords in refusing its assent to the Budget was utterly wrong, opposed not only to constitutional custom and practice, but also to common sense. It seems to us, therefore, at least probable that Mr. Asquith will, at any rate, be armed with the requisite authority not only for carrying this Budget through the House of Lords, but also for placing on the Statute Book a constitutional guarantee that future Budgets shall be free from the veto of the Second Chamber. If in addition to this a form of selfgovernment for Ireland coupled with a redistribution of seats that will be satisfactory to reasonable men, can be de vised and carried, together with a reform of the House of Lords and a limi

The latest volume in the "Wisdom of the East" series (E. P. Dutton & Co. publishers) is entitled "The Path of Light." It is a manual of Maha-yana Buddhism and as the first rendering into English from the Bodhi-Charyavatara of Santi-Deva it will attract the attention of students of Oriental thought and faith.

The Rev. Samuel McChord Crothers's clever essay on "The Autocrat and his Fellow Boarders," is published by the Houghton Mifflin Company in a slender volume entitled "Oliver Wendell Holmes," which contains also a dozen, more or less, of Holmes's most characteristic poems. The combination of author and subject is a happy one, for Mr. Crothers has a gift much like that of the Autocrat himself of whimsical humor and the saying of unexpected things.

A yearbook dainty in its exterior and rich and varied in its contents is that which Mrs. Emily V. Hammond has edited under the title "Looking Upward Day by Day" (E. P. Dutton & Co.). The selections are true throughout to the hopeful aspiration suggested by . the title. Grouped each month under general designations, as "Ideals," "Success and Failure," "Sympathy and Cheerfulness," etc., they give for each day of the year a page containing a

verse from the Bible and passages in prose and verse from a wide range of authors in unison therewith.

To their admirable series of annotated texts for school use, published under the general title of "English Readings," Henry Holt & Co. have added a volume of "Selections from Johnson," edited by Charles Grosvenor Osgood, preceptor in English in Princeton University. Rasselas is not included because it is presented in an earlier volume in the same series, but there are extracts from Johnson's verse, and representative passages from his prose, including his letters, the whole making, with introduction and notes, a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Charles H. L. Johnston follows his "Famous Cavalry Leaders," one of the most stirring and wholesome books of adventure for boy readers, with a volume on "Famous Indian Chiefs" in which are narrated true stories of Indian chiefs, from Powhatan to Sitting Bull, who have figured in American history. The narrative is written with spirit and will engage the attention of wide-awake boy readers. There are sixteen illustrations. L. C. Page & Co., who publish Mr. Johnston's book, add to their "Little Cousin" series "Our Little Persian Cousin" by E. C. Shedd. and "Our Little Hungarian Cousin" by