"We had; but they have all gone, it seems, now that their leader has been taken." "Only too glad to go, I expect." They went into the " garden," where silence and darkness held illimitable dominion over the maze of paths and barns and outbuildings a startling contrast to the tumult and fracas of only half an hour ago. They went cautiously, still advancing only a few yards at a time. All at once, breaking the tranquillity that had come over the place, arose out of the silence an unexpected sound that puzzled them at first not a little. “Ma-a-a, Ma-a-a-a!” One of the soldiers had stumbled into whatever it was that uttered this doleful note of protest. Wynterfold and Erskine looked down, and in the shine of their torches saw there so tightly hobbled as to make even the restricted pastureground in which he was confined unnecessary, pitifully bleating, mournfully complaining as he tugged at his leather thong-a solitary goat. MUSINGS WITHOUT METHOD. THE STRIKE OF THE COAL-MINERS-A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT -THE DUKE OF NORTHUMBERLAND'S SPEECH-THE INFLUENCE OF ALIEN IMMIGRANTS—HOW SHALL IT BE OPPOSED-THE JUST POLICY OF EXCLUSION THE LESSON OF RUSSIA-A POMPOUS WHITE BOOK-QUEEN VICTORIA. THE strike of the coal-miners, which is bringing the country to the verge of bankruptcy, is in no sense industrial. It is nothing more nor less than a thinly veiled revolution. If only the other two members of the Triple Alliance are persuaded to join the miners, the whole life of the nation may be paralysed. It seems as though the workers, who are not very clever and are the easily-made dupes of international rascals, had resolved upon suicide. For there can be no mistake: if the workers succeeded in their policy of destroying the industry of Great Britain, whatever happened to the capitalists, they themselves would be irretrievably ruined. The time of high wages would never return, and the workers would become the victims of impudent fanatics, like Lenin and Trotsky, who would first reduce their courage and energy by the cheap method of starvation, and then enrol them forcibly as conscripts in the army of labour. These simple and oft-stated truths should have been evident long ago. And Parliament and the Press have conspired to huddle them out of sight. The working man must not be irritated, we are told, lest worse befall. He must not be protected against the infamous men of foreign race who wish, for vile purposes of their own, to bring the British Empire to ruin. And this policy of silence is the more severely to be condemned, because the British working man, if left to himself, is sound and sane, and has no desire to starve himself and his wife and his children to death for the sake of the Third International. Unfortunately, his titular leaders either lack the courage to tell the truth to those who keep them in luxury, or are themselves the purchased slaves of German, Russian, and Jewish plotters against the British Empire, the object of their peculiar jealousy and hate. Nor have our Ministers done their duty in telling the truth, of which they alone are in full possession, and in warning the middle and the working class alike of the danger which lies ahead of them. The Duke of Northumberland has, in difficult circumstances, performed a service to the community, whose value cannot be over-estimated. In a world of deception he has spoken out loud and clear. He mies, the leaders of Labour have made a friend wherever they found a foe of England, and have blackmailed Mr Lloyd George to such purpose that the British Prime Minister has done his best to prolong the hateful régime of Lenin and Trotsky, who have brought the fair land of Russia to the edge of starvation, and have at the same time found millions to spend in stirring up strife in Great Britain and her dependencies. And the home policy of labour has been no less wicked than its foreign policy. Moderates and extremists have lived in a common realm of ideas. They have spread class-hatred, wherever they met and spoke, with a malicious ignorant eagerness; they have represented has shown how there exists a world - conspiracy against the British Empire, a conspiracy in which three hidden forces may be discerned-German intrigue, international finance, and the international revolutionary Labour movement. The eagerness with which our own revolutionary leaders have taken to their hearts the Russian Bolsheviks, especially when they have come bearing gifts in their hands, has been visible to all. It has been confessed by Mr Baird in the House of Commons that £23,000 was paid into the treasury of English labour by foreign conspirators in a single month. As the Duke points out, every revolutionary movement which the Russian Bolsheviks now, and Germany in the past, have capitalism," which Russia has engineered in India, in Egypt, proved to be the only basis of in Ireland, and every revolu- prosperity, as the embodiment tionary strike in this country, of evil; they have undermined have been supported even by patriotism and national unity; the moderates of labour. The they have discussed the affairs foreign policy of the Labour of Britain in the broken Engleaders, he adds, is "in every lish of Jewish cosmopolitanism; respect the foreign policy of they have created contempt for the German Junker and of all forms of authority, and have Soviet Russia-hostility to destroyed the meaning of the France, because she is our word loyalty in every relation natural ally; hostility to Po- of life, whether public or priland, because she is the key-vate. In brief, the point of stone of the peace settlement; the strike is not whether the the realisation of the Pan- rest of the community shall German dream of Mittel-Europe make a present to the miners through the disruption of the of many millions a year, or Central European State by whether a national pool is a granting self-determination to possible policy. The real questheir German minorities." tion at issue is: Shall England Thus in their hatred of the be governed by Englishmen, or "capitalist," inspired in un- shall it be controlled by a thinking minds by foreign ene- rabble of Jews, who have been admitted to our shores, from Germany and Russia, by the carelessness of the Home Secretary? The English leaders of labour, then, use the same language and advocate the same wicked methods of destruction as the Bolsheviks of Russia. make peace with an Ireland which chooses as the representative of Irish nationalism a gentleman who bears the good old Gaelic name of Valera! They are prepared to cover up any difficulty which arises with soft words and softer thoughts. They refuse to exclude foreign propaganda, because they are afraid its exclusion would not be popular. We cannot depend upon the help of the Press, which, with a single exception, either contemned or refrained from reporting the Duke of Northumberland's speech. It would be rash to look to the Government for help. But what if Mr Lloyd George did speak out? In the Duke of Northumberland's words, "the country would rally to the Government, and a new spirit would awake They think it no shame to accept the bribes offered them by murderous assassins. The rank and file are kept sedulously in ignorance of the plot, and being highly susceptible to inflammatory rhetoric, accept the vile heresies of Bolshevism as the plain and simple truth. 66 When all is said and done -it is still the Duke of Northumberland who speaks-"when every allowance is made, it remains a story of the blackest treachery. And what makes it infinitely worse is the pretence made throughout of con--the spirit of 1914. But that stitutional aims, of a desire to better the lot of the workers, and to further the true interests of the industry; while the real purpose has been to ruin the country, their fellow-workmen, and the industry in order to further the interests of the world-revolution." The evil may be combated, and must be combated, at once. The country, says the Duke of Northumberland, has been lulled to a sense of false security at the moment of the greatest danger. So we are fighting a hidden ignored enemy. The Government and the Press agree in preserving a false appearance of fatuous optimism. They are ready to VOL. CCIX.-NO. MCCLXVIII. spirit will only be evoked by telling the country the simple facts of the case-that an alien conspiracy is at work among us; that the men who are running it are deliberately betraying this country into the hands of its enemies; that they will stop at nothing to gain their ends; that those ends are universal misery and ruin; and that our people, who lost a million dead in fighting Germany, are now being starved into submission by the same men who were the tools of Germany and Russia during the war." The first need, therefore, is for candour and openness of speech. For these we must 3 I look to Mr Lloyd George, and if he refrain from truth, it will be hard for us to escape revolution. It is idle at this moment to think of the ballot-box, since if the tide of rebellion be not stayed, the ballot-boxes of England will be more fit for an antiquarian museum than for practical use. And when at last the truth is out, then it will be the duty of the Government to repeal the Trade Disputes Act, that infamous measure which set the Unions above the law, and deliberately encouraged the making of revolutions. Of this disgraceful Act Mr Lloyd George himself was in favour. Its begetter was Mr Asquith, who, having said that in no circumstances would he support it, passed it with the cynicism which has always been his chief characteristic. That he feels any discomfort in his desperate responsibility we do not believe. The man who is called upon to bear the burden of the murders committed in Ireland is not likely to be kept awake by the memory of the Trade Disputes Act. Happily, Mr Asquith is politically dead, though the evil that he did lives after him. It is for those who survive to undo the harm that he did as best they may; and with all speed they must abolish the charter of crime and lawlessness which is known most pompously as the Trade Disputes Act. One other step remains to be taken. We must without delay safeguard Great Britain against the invasion of predatory aliens. We must preserve our mother-country for the men and women, bred upon the soil, who, if they be once again left to themselves, will return to sanity and to a love of their own land and its noble traditions. England for the English is no mean cry, and to-day it is raised in vain. At this moment, when even such States as the Argentine Republic are doing their best to exclude aliens of subversive opinion, we open our ports wide to them. We invite them to enter our country, where they repay the gift of hospitality by corrupting our citizens and covering the face of Britain with their lying pamphlets. They hope that in the general upheaval they may steal something; and though our Government is not without knowledge of their hope, it makes no effort to bang the door of good English oak in their faces-a door which Mr Churchill was once ready to bang in the face of men of our own Dominions oversea. At the moment when there are not enough houses for the citizens of Great Britain, we admit aliens by the hundred thousand. Though there is not work for all Englishmen, we do not object to the presence of foreigners, who increase the competition of labour, already severe, and who have not the slightest claim on our forbearance. No doubt they employ their enforced leisure, when their toil is not preferred to that of Englishmen, in sowing |