have supposed might reach the Czar from France or Germany, is a very different thing from the open cancellation of a visit publicly announced. Such a step might easily be interpreted as a censure, and almost as a threat. The Economist.

It is only to be hoped that the course of events in Russia will not make the visit an absurdity. But that result is highly probable unless the Czar and the Duma come to an understanding at once.

We note with annoyance tempered with amusement that certain not very wise people have been declaring that the indignation expressed in England over the tinned meat scandals is a sign of the inherent hostility of the British to the American people. It has been said, not impossibly by persons interested in the meat-canning business, that Britain has positively rejoiced over the Chicago revelations because they have done injury to America, and that the people here have thus shown their detestation of the hated Yankee. Nothing, of course, could possibly be further from the facts than these wild perversions. No doubt the British public, like the American public, though in a less degree, have been horrified by the investigations begun by Mr. Sinclair, and maintained by the President of the United States, his official inquirers, and virtually the whole Press of America. But, because the indignation aroused in America has been so largely reflected here, it is utterly ridiculous to speak of the exponents of that indignation as exulting in an American misfortune. It would be about as sensible to say that a man who denounces the wickedness of a clerk who has swindled his cousin's firm, and who joins his cousin in lamenting that he let this department of his business be so carelessly managed, is delighted at his cousin's misfortune. Thank heaven, the authors and maintainers of the Beef Trust scandals are not the American people, and we may surely continue to

denounce the men responsible for those scandals without giving any one just cause to say that we are denouncing the people of America. Not the most "touchy" of Americans can pretend that the Spectator is unfriendly to America, or delighted to see her in any form of trouble. Nevertheless, we shall continue to speak our mind as to the authors and aiders and abettors of the beef scandals, and in spite of the efforts of those who sympathize at heart with the Trusts and are trying to divert attention from their misdeeds by abusing the British people as hostile to America. That is, indeed, what this attack upon the British public for interesting themselves in the meat scandals comes to. It is an effort to cover up the traces of the evildoers.

In truth, there never was a time when the British people were more sympathetic to the Americans, or more anxious to see good influences triumph over bad in the United States. At this moment President Roosevelt is what he has been for many years,-one of the most popular figures in the Englishspeaking world. To our people he stands for whatever is honorable, highminded, courageous, wholesome, and sincere in the conduct of public affairs, and we do not hesitate to say that if he were to visit England he would have a reception which would rival that given to Garibaldi at the height of his popularity, and that it would be a reception in which every class in the community would join with equal

pleasure. Proof of this fact is afforded by the reception which has been accorded to President Roosevelt's daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Longworth. Mr. and Mrs. Longworth will, we are sure, pardon us and understand our meaning when we say that the interest shown in their visit to London is not due to the presence among us even of so charming and distinguished a young couple, but to the fact that they are the daughter and the sonin-law of Theodore Roosevelt. The warm-hearted tributes which have been paid to them, not merely by London society, but by people of all classes wherever they have been recognized, are due to the honor and respect, and in the best sense the popularity, enjoyed by the President here. It is not too much to say, indeed, that it is very difficult to find Englishmen or Englishwomen who have not a warm place in their hearts for the President of the United States. They feel, too, that at this moment he is engaged in something very like a life-and-death struggle with the most selfish elements in American commercial life, and that he is fighting for them, as well as for his own fellowcitizens, the battle of purity against corruption. Though they may not understand the details of the Trust question and of the political battle that is now raging in Washington, they realize fully the general nature of the struggle, -that a man who is neither a Socialist nor a revolutionary, but a friend of well-ordered government and moderate counsels (a Whig in the best sense, as we have ventured to call him), is fighting the battle of honest government. Unfortunately, owing to certain features of the Constitution of the United States, he is obliged to fight his formidable antagonist with one hand tied behind his back. That disability, however, makes us as a people all the keener and more interested in the great duel. If we may alter a phrase of

Chatham's, the attitude of the British people is like that which the great commoner declared was his own attitude towards the Great Rebellion. "There may have been rashness; there may have been over-confidence; there may have been exaggeration; but you shall never persuade us that it is not the cause of political honesty and righteousness on the one side, and of corruption and selfish monopoly on the other." There is a story in the "Morte d'Arthur" of a knight riding through a forest and seeing a combat between a snake and a lion. The knight had strictly no right to interfere in the conflict, for it was no quarrel of his. Yet we are told that he did not hesitate to take sides with the lion, for "he was the more natural beast of the twain." Here the public not only sympathize with the lion as the more natural beast, but they actually feel that he is fighting their battle both on the moral side and on the not unimportant side of securing a clean and wholesome foodsupply for the world. If we cannot rely upon the soundness of the meat that comes to us from America, our consumers are bound to suffer almost as greatly as the American public do. If, then, by his action President Roosevelt is ultimately able to give us an assurance that the meat sent out from Chicago has a clean bill of health, he will be doing no small service to the British people. We could not see so important a portion of our meat-supplies cut off without suffering a great and growing inconvenience.

We do not feel that it is necessary to address any words of caution to the British people as to their criticisms of the meat scandals, for we have seen no sort of indication that those criticisms have been unfair or unfriendly, or that they have been inspired by anything except the very natural desire to be protected from the consumption of tainted meat, and by the less personal,

but not less genuine, desire that America shall be freed from the tyranny of a corrupt and corrupting monopoly. If, however, we may do so without offence, we should like to address a word of warning to the American public, and to ask them not to be misled by false or hasty or ignorant accounts of English public opinion. The American people are just now most naturally in a state of anger and excitement, and when people are angry and excited they may be easily misled. Now it is obviously the interest of those who are implicated in the Trust scandals, or who are afraid that future revelations may damage Trusts and monopolies which are at present untouched, to do all they can to turn public attention away from themselves. Every effort will, we may be sure, be made by the astute and not over-scrupulous men who are in danger from public opinion to divert attention from themselves by raising the cry of the hostility of the British people. That, we would ask our American friends to remember, is The Spectator.

altogether a sham outcry and a sham issue. The British people are essentially friendly to America and to all that is best in America, and even though they may sometimes express themselves bluntly, clumsily, and injudiciously, what they are condemning is not the American people, but that small minority of persons who have done so cruel a wrong to the American people. Let the Americans, when they hear charges as vague as they are inflammatory brought against the people of this country of hating America, answer that they are not going to be deflected from punishing men of their own household whom they know to be doing wrong by the interested cry that somebody on the other side of the street is making ugly faces. The wise man when he has got a malefactor by the scruff of his neck does not relax his hold because the malefactor shouts out: "Don't hit me, Sir. The man you ought to hit is that wicked old cousin of yours opposite. I swear I heard him chuckling over your troubles!"

Thirty years ago the little colony of New Zealand showed few signs of becoming the democratic laboratory of the Empire. Indeed, it passed as conservative amongst colonies. The Australia of those days was defined as Democracy tempered by Banks. But in New Zealand demos was repressed by something more than the overshadowing influence of financial institutions. The island had attracted in the early days of the Colony an unusual proportion of educated members of the English middle and upper-middle classes. Endowed, some of them, with much ability, these men dominated the young community, filling the professions and occupying much of the land. With

them were allied self-made colonists, hard-headed nouveaux riches, whose industrial and social ideals were summed up in the terse sentence, "the devil take the hindmost!" When in 1877 Sir George Grey rallied a Radical party round him, and for a moment snatched office from the champions of property, an outburst of excitement which was a curious mixture of amazement and contempt shook the small New Zealand communities from south to north. All Grey's eloquence and courage could not save him from defeat, defeat to which his own following added humiliation. They met and deposed him. Amongst the few who stood faithful to the fallen chieftain in the crisis was a

a

young "miner's agent" just returned to Parliament by a goldfield district. He was noteworthy for a huge chest-girth and an equal measure of self-assertion; for a rush of words; for a plentiful ignorance of political theories, and for a knowledge of parliamentary procedure quite striking in a novice. His head made one think of steam-hammers and tomahawks and other things forceful and aggressive. And the pallor of his face was lit up by two alert blue eyes and by a peculiarly pleasant-nay, sweet-smile playing round a wellshaped mouth. Richard Seddon had, moreover, an instinctive grasp of tactics and an utter disregard of hard knocks. Of these latter he had, in his early days, to take more than he gave, for the triumphant respectability of the Colony, flushed with victory over Grey, was not inclined to be forbearing. looked upon Richard Seddon as a grotesque apparition in a Legislature whose friends fondly regarded it as still perhaps the most orderly and dignified in the British Colonies. He became Respectability's favorite butt and béte noire. When he was obstructive, as he very often was, he would be pelted with threats, imprecations, entreaties and sarcasm, of none of which he took the faintest notice. Making many mistakes, he went doggedly on, and in the scuffles of the years that followed Grey's eclipse, it began to be understood that his athletic follower, Richard Seddon, was a man who could not be disregarded.

It

Naturally enough, New Zealand bas in sixty-five years produced very few names of Imperial distinction. Gibbon Wakefield and Bishop Selwyn can scarcely be classed as New Zealanders. Grey and Seddon can. They both had come to man's estate before setting foot in the far-off Colony. Even so, they are the only two public names on the Colony's roll which are widely known in the outside world. Externally and

in tone and methods no two men could be more unlike than the cultivated exViceroy who founded the New Zealand democratic party and the rough Lancashire lad who captained it when it reached the pinnacle of its success. Yet there was something alike in their destinies. Grey, who by birth and temperament seemed made to be an English official of the aristocratic type, ended as a colonial tribune of the people. Seddon, whom fate seemed to have qualified to be a labor-anarchist, will best be remembered outside New Zealand as an outspoken advocate of Imperialism. And the two men, again, had this in common: that they sincerely sympathized with the lot of the masses, and that in the battles of politics they did not know what fear was. Great, however, would be the injustice of suggesting that Mr. Seddon's only remarkable qualities were a rude indifference to blows and the sort of burly strength that shoulders competitors out of the way. Strong he was, or he could not have overcome the intense prejudices he had to encounter. Burly he was, or he could not have trampled on opponent after opponent during twenty-seven years passed on the confused battlefields of colonial politics. But even the strength of a giant, and the disposition to use it as a giant, would not have availed him had he not been gifted with a more than common share of mental acuteness and practical sagacity which Britons choose to call commonsense. His industry, moreover, though in part wasted over ignoble details, was very great, and his concentration almost præter-human. He lived for politics as New York millionaires live for finance. He had no social ambitions, no recreations, power of enjoying idleness. From his father, a schoolmaster, he had a common school education. But he cared little for books. Hard experience constituted his library, and the struggle for

no

life had taught him useful if bitter lessons. Englishmen are so accustomed to associate statesmanship with a classical training and an Oxford accent that they are apt to forget that the world has often produced men of vast organizing and administrative power who never read a book, and some who could not write their names. At any rate, Mr. Seddon did not despise education. He was, throughout his public life, a sympathetic supporter of the New Zealand National School system, and it has been pointed out that in the last few years of his life, when already overburdened with work, he snatched time to subsidize and liberalize the secondary schools of his Colony. Of course he paid for his comparative lack of education and the coarse surroundings of his pioneer days. He never appeared able to estimate the precise value of comparatives and superlatives; to the last he seemed to imagine that strong language was the only language befitting a strong man. His megaphonic exhortations to the political parties in this country occasionally lent themselves to ridicule. But there was at least no mistaking his views; and the patriotism, which took the shape of sending ten contingents of mounted riflemen to fight for the mother-country in South Africa, had a right, if it chose, to express itself loudly. Looking round us we can see in high places an abundance of cultured people; of refined pedantry; of timidity at critical moments; of perverse skill in criticising constructive work and throwing cold water upon enthusiasm. There is much to be said for the occasional intrusion into public life of the bulky, strenuous man, whose intentions are clear if their expression be rugged, and for whom patriotism and the prosperity and happiness of his people are good enough as working ideals. After all a public man is a man of action; he must be judged not

It is all very

by what he says nearly as much as by what he does. It is by his acts that we must measure Mr. Seddon, and thus measured it will be hard to contend that he does not emerge triumphant from the test. well to say that New Zealand's experimental legislation-the work of a group of men of whom he alone had the stuff in him to achieve celebrity-has yet to stand the test of time. That is a commonplace concerning institutions and achievements of our own day. What can be claimed for Mr. Seddon is that he took the highest political office in an hour when his adopted country was depressed to the verge of despair, and that he died leaving it prosperous beyond precedent. In 1893 the socialistic policy of the Ballance Cabinet had indeed gained enthusiastic support, but it was only half passed and not half digested by the country. Under Seddon it was passed almost in its entirety, was amplified and given free play. Yet never were the limits of safety transgressed, never was social order disturbed, never was intolerable wrong done. Thirteen years of work may not be a final test, but to show that strange and daring experiments can be made to work, and work safely for a number of years, is in itself a very great achievement. Even should failure come, it will always be open to Mr. Seddon's friends to claim that failure did not come in his time. And, on the personal side, they may claim what is rare indeed, that as a political captain he was never beaten, and died unconquered. For, in a colony where Ministries had been brief and sometimes absurdly impotent and ephemeral, he not only held power for thirteen years, but when he died had well-nigh annihilated opposition. He survived or outwitted equals, knocked over smaller antagonists, crushed intrigue within his party, routed open opposition. He did this because he not only gained