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Great Rebellion. For the really Great Rebellion was the one that never happened. But, indeed, it is unnecessary even to urge so generally accepted a conjecture as this: Whatever may be true of the rebellion as a whole, no one will deny that at certain moments Puritanism appeared in politics as arrogant, fastidious and anti-popular; full of the pride of predestination and the scorn of all flesh. Even the most enthusiastic upholder of the Whig or Republican theory of Puritanism will hardly pretend that when Colonel Pride drove out of Parliament at the point of the pike all the members who ventured to disagree with him, his soul was at that moment inflamed with an enthusiasm for free discussion or representative government. It was by no means democratic; but it was highly Calvinistic. It was a sort of public pantomime of the doctrine of election; of election in the theological, but by no means in the political sense. It is still called "Pride's Purge"; and the phrase has quite a fine allegorical flavor, as if it came out of the Pilgrim's Progress. In fact, one of the really happy coincidences of the historical epoch was that one distinguished officer at any rate had somehow got hold of the right surname. And upon larger grounds the alliance between oligarchy and extreme Protestanism has become only too plain. For all we know the Reformation may have tried to make a democracy; all that we do know for certain is that it did make an aristocracy, the most powerful aristocracy of modern times. The great English landlords, who are the peers, arose after the destruction of the small English landlords, who were the abbots. The public schools, which were popular in the Middle Ages, became aristocratic after the Reformation. The universities, which were popular in the Middle Ages, became aristocratic after the Reformation. The tramp who went

to a monastic inn in the Middle Ages, went to jail and the whipping-post ofter the Reformation. All this is scarcely denied.

Yet against all this must be put in fairness certain important facts; especially two facts illustrated in the figure and career of Milton. When we have clearly seen that Calvinism always favors aristocracy in theory and often favored it in practice, the two great facts remain to be explained or explained away: first, that the Puritans did favor a deliberative or synodical method of church government, a government by debate; and, second, that most of the abstract republicans of the seventeenth century were either Puritans or upon the Puritan side. I am not, of course, discussing the Synod as a mode of church government, nor the Republic as a mode of national government. I only say that the clamor for these things must have corresponded to some kind of enthusiasm for liberty and equality, alien to the more obvious lessons of Calvinism. But the republicanism was of a peculiar and frigid kind; there was very little human fraternity about it. Fletcher of Saltown was the author of some epigrams about the public good that ring like those of some great pagan; but he was also the author of a proposal to reduce all the poorer inhabitants of Scotland to a condition of personal slavery. There was a flavor of Fletcher of Saltown about Milton. Shakespeare puts into the mouth of some character (generally a silly character) some contemptuous talk about the greasy rabble, talk which is common in all literary work, but especially common in work which, like Shakespeare's, was intended entirely to please the greasy rabble. Whenever this happens critics point to it and say, "Look at the Tory prejudices of the royalist Shakespeare! Observe the Jacobite servility of the follower of James I" But as a matter of fact Mil

ton despised the populace much more than Shakespeare; and Milton put his contempt for common men not into the mouths of silly characters, but into that of the one wise character, the Chorus, who is supposed to express the moral of a play

Nor do I name of men the common rout

But such as thou hast solemnly elected.

I

cannot help thinking that Milton was so successful with Satan because he was rather like Satan himself. mean his own Satan: I will not be so intemperate as to say that he resembled the genuine article. The kind of strength that supported Milton in blindness and outlawry was very like the kind of strength that supported Satan on the flaming marl; it is the same quality, and for merely literary purposes we need not quarrel about whether it should be called spiritual nobility or spiritual pride. It was almost wholly intellectual; it was unsmiling and it was empty of affections.) And in justice to the genial if somewhat vague people who made up the bulk of the Royalist party, and probably the bulk of the English people, we must remember that there was about the high republican type, the type of Vane, or Sydney, and of Milton, something of this austerity which chilled and even alarmed. There was something in the republican that was not brotherly; there was something in the republican that was not democratic. The compound of the new Puritan and the old pagan citizen produced none of those hearty or homely drinkers, soldiers, or ruffians, men like Danton or Dumouriez, who lent laughter to the terrors of the French Revolution. The deepest dislike which the Cavaliers felt for the Puritans, and no unjust dislike either, had reference to this nameless feeling. "Our soldiers," said an old royalist when reproached with the licence of the royal camp, "had the sins

LIVING AGE. VOL. XLVI. 2424

of men, wine and wenching; yours had the sins of devils, spiritual pride and rebellion."

It is possible, I fancy, to frame a fair statement that shall admit this element of the pride of the elect while doing justice to the democratic germ in Puritanism. It was the misfortune of that age that the synodic or debatingclub idea was applied, not to the whole people as among the pagans, but to small groups or sections among the people. Equality appeared in the form of little separate chapels, not in the form of one great national temple. Thus the Puritan movement encouraged the sense of the equality of members without encouraging the sense of the equality of men. Each little sect was a democracy internally considered, but an oligarchy externally considered. For an aristocracy is none the less aristocratic because its members are all on a level; indeed, this is rather a mark of aristocracy; in this sense most aristocrats have been levellers. Even the House of Lords is called the House of Equals: the House of Peers. Thus arose a spirit which had the plainness and much of the harshness of democracy without any of its sympathy or abandon. Thus arose the great race of the aristocratic republicans, half pagan and half Puritan, the greatest of whom was Milton.

The effect of this great type has been immense; but it has been largely a negative effect. If the English people have remained somewhat inaccessible to the more ideal aspect of the republican idea, and they certainly have; if, through failing to understand it, they have done gross injustice to the heroisms and even to the crimes of the French Revolution, it is in no small degree due to this ungenial element in the only great school of English republicans. The ultimate victory of Shakespeare over Milton has been very largely due to the primary victory of Il

Penseroso over L'Allegro. The return of Charles II was the return of a certain snobbish compromise which we have never since shaken off, and which is

certainly far less heroic than the dreadful patriotism of the great regicides; but the balance and

excuse of that English snobbishness was that it was also the return of English humor and good nature. So we see it in Milton, in the one great Elizabethan who became a The Oxford and Cambridge Review.

Puritan. His earlier poems are the dying cries of Merry England. England, like Milton's own Samson, lost its strength when it lost its long hair. Milton was one of the slayers; but he was also one of the slain. The mystery of his strange mind confronts us for ever; we do not know what he really saw with his sightless eyes; we do not know of what god or demon or destiny he had really caught sight afar off. We only know that it turned him to stone. G. K. Chesterton.

THE BASIS OF THE WAGE.

The oblong envelope stuck over the edge of the breakfast tray, looking very white against the coarse grayness of

the cloth.

The woman moved forward swiftly from the door, and grabbed it, picking feverishly at the flap. The envelope fluttered to the thready carpet, as she peered at the few typewritten lines, frowning to overcome the momentary spasm in her eyes. After she had read the letter she sat down in front of the tray, smiling a little.

She ate a little bread-and-butter, and sipped at a large cup of tea; but she kept looking at the letter beside her, reading it over and over again; and very soon she got up from the table. For a little while she stood staring at a remnant of pattern at the edge of the carpet, then she crossed suddenly to the mantlepiece, and looked into the mirror, which was covered with little brown spots. She frowned at the oblique hollows in her cheeks, and then into the reflection of her tired eyes. Presently she turned away and left the room.

When she returned, dressed to go out, the landlady was taking away the tray.

The woman spoke hurriedly from the doorway. "At last, I've had a reply;

it's the last I answered-the cashier one."

The landlady stood, pressing the tray against her waistband. "I said you'd get one soon; and you would fret." The woman's forehead wrinkled. "Oh, I know," continued the landlady, "it isn't nice owing people money, and London isn't the best place to do it in neither, especially when you're alone in the world." Then she made a move to pass out. "Well, anyway, I 'ope you'll be successful; then it will be all right." She moved towards the door.

The woman was examining a pair of stained gloves, finger by finger. She looked up. "I hope so. But I've only been told to call so far. Thank you all the same, Mrs. Bassett."

The landlady turned at the open door. "Oh, you'll stand a good chance against most of them, I know," she announced, "though there's sure to be a lot."

"I'm afraid so," murmured the woman, as the landlady left the room.

As the clock of a church was striking ten, the woman stood in the gloomy entrance passage of a big block of offices, reading the rows of names painted on the wall. Men and women, hurrying into the building, jostled past her.

With a slow movement of her eyes she read from the top to half way down the wall; then she turned, walked along the passage, and went up the stone stairs.

On the second floor she hesitated in front of a double, glass-panelled swing. door. Her chin went up with a little jerk as she suddenly stepped forward and pushed in.

On the left side, on a long bench, sat four girls who eyed her as she entered. She glanced at them and crossed to the counter, standing there gazing at the bowed heads of several men who sat writing at a long, high desk. While she waited, a girl came through a door in the partition on the right, made a little grimace of disappointment at the row on the bench, and passed out through the swing-door.

"Next!" called out a youth, coming to the counter and looking at the girls. The girl next the counter got up.

The youth eyed the woman, care. lessly. "Advertisement? Over there, please." He nodded towards the bench; then he returned behind the par tition.

The woman sat down on the end of the bench away from the counter.

After a while the girl flounced out from the partition-door, frowning, and crossed to the bench. "Nine to seven," she muttered to the first girl in the

row.

"Next!" called out the youth from behind the partition.

The first girl got up. "Nine to seven! Oh, dear!" she sighed. She smoothed down her short brown skirt and pushed up her hair off her forehead with a quick movement of her hands; then she passed through the partition door.

The woman examined her gloved hands, back and front, gazed at the movements of the clerks at the high desk, eyed the two girls next the counter, furtively; but she kept glancing every now and then at the partition.

So she sat waiting and watching. As a girl came out through the partition, the youth called out, and the next girl went in; each time the woman moved one place nearer to the counter. At last she sat next to it.

Two more girls came in through the swing-door, one after the other, looked round, saw the woman on the bench, and came and sat down. While the woman was looking at them, the partition-door swung open. The last girl came out, staring blindly ahead. Her under lip trembled a little.

"Next!" called out the youth. "Quickly, please!"

The woman jumped up off the bench and went through.

"Straight along the passage to the door at the end," said the youth, halfturning from a row of speaking-tubes on the other side of the partition.

The woman nodded and moved swiftly along. At the door she hesitated; then her shoulders heaved slightly; she knocked and entered.

"Name?" asked a voice from behind a desk. "Please come forward."

The woman moved up to the side of the desk. "Madge Blenkinsop," she replied.

"Blenkinsop, Blenkinsop," repeated the man, turning a bundle of papers clipped together at the corner. "Blenkinsop, right," he added, without looking up.

The woman watched him as he read her application.

The man looked up; he leaned back in his chair and eyed her with a long searching stare. The woman looked at him, shifted her position, and looked away.

The man continued to stare. "Age?" he asked.

The woman looked back at him. "I'm twenty-eight," she answered.

"H'm. Done anything since this?" The man tapped the typewritten testimonials with the back of his fingers.

"I haven't been able to get any- wall; she looked down at him with a thing," replied the woman. jerk. "I beg your pardon," she said, hurriedly.

"H'm," repeated the man. "You're a bit old." Then his voice changed to a sing-song utterance. "Cashier at our Camden-road Depot; nine to seven; twelve and sixpence a week; black dress." He looked up at the woman.

Her eyes clouded; and she looked down into the man's face, her forehead puckering. "Twelve and six-pence,"

she repeated.

"Yes; twelve and six," said the man, "and I've had about two hundred replies." Then his voice softened, as he watched the blank look on the woman's face. "You see, we expect our employees to be living at home. You are living at home, I suppose?"

The woman was staring away at the

The Nation.

"I asked you whether you were living at home," said the man.

The woman nodded her head quickly several times, and swallowed, as if she had a lump in her throat; then she spoke quite slowly. "Yes; I am living at home."

"That's all right, then," said the man, moving in his chair. "You can start next Monday; 264a, Camden-road. Be there at nine. Good-day." He nodded at the woman, and turned to a speaking-tube by his desk.

"Thank you very much. Good-day, Sir," said the woman in a low voice. Then she turned and moved towards the door, walking slowly.

Charles Inge.

VOTES IN THE VILLAGE.

The village has spoken. The poll is closed; and the fraction of a nation's diIvided will contained in some two hundred voting-papers is on its guarded way to the county town. The little knots of onlookers drift away from the lane before the school-house, where all day the motor-cars backed and turned and churned the mud. At the crossways, where the lane joins the high road, a group halts under the last lamp for one more argument; and an old man, tall and thin, gray-whiskered, in clothes of somewhat antique cut, a John Bull grown lean and strenuous under hard times, leaves the company to their discussion and takes the way across the fields to High Chimneys Farm. He is followed by a friendly "Good-night, Mas' Denton," and when he is a little farther out of range by two or three jeering whoops which signify a touch of party feeling. At his yard gate he stops, with his hand on the latch; the night is mild and still,

and he turns to look back at the blur of yellow light on the low-hung clouds above the line of lamps and windows which marks the village street. He is not sorry that the fight is over; though these be pigmy wars compared with the giant contests of his youth, there is a wicked temper in the strife which tells him that he has had enough. Forty years in the south have not taken much of the edge from his north-country breeding; his memories of old election times in a Yorkshire woolen town in the 'forties, of the processions with bands and banners to the hustings, the fights, the chairing after the poll, make these latter-day campaigns of softer Arcady, the philippics on the village green addressed to loafing boys with their hands in their pockets and cigarettes in their mouths, the all-but unanimous meetings in the impartial schoolroom, seem the diversions of a feebler breed. Here the fiercest reprisal is the tearing-down of a poster, which the

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