Bulgaria has shown more readiness than any of our late enemies to carry out the crushing obligations imposed upon her, and the Allies have taken advantage of this attitude to treat her with greater severity than other States which have given more trouble. It may be possible to justify this policy, but it is surely impossible to deny that the Allied Powers, on their part, ought to carry out their Treaty undertakings towards Bulgaria. This they have failed to do.

They undertook, for instance, to provide Bulgaria with a commercial outlet on the Ægean. Not only have they done nothing to fulfil this promise, but the British Government still insists on retaining Greek sovereignty over Western Thrace (where less than a third of the population is Greek), which is equivalent to debarring Bulgaria altogether from direct access to the Mediterranean.

But the question which affects the Bulgarians even more vitally is that of the protection of minorities, for at least a quarter of the Bulgarian race is under the rule of its worst enemies. The Allied Powers have undertaken, in the St. Germain and other Treaties, to safeguard the racial and religious rights of minorities in Serbia, Roumania, and Greece. Since these Treaties were signed, tens of thousands of Bulgarians have been driven from their homes in Macedonia and Thrace ; all Bulgarian schools have been closed, and all Bulgarian churches handed over to the Patriarchists.

Nowhere in the world has industrialism achieved such a complete victory as in England. Here alone do we see a Society which exists entirely by and for a cosmopolitan market, and which has lost the last remnants of economic self-sufficiency. And the disturbance of social equilibrium is the more profound because the England of the past was, more perhaps than any other country in Western Europe, an essentially agrarian State. The changes which have made English society and civilization so entirely different in type to anything that exists on the other side of the Channel, in so far as they are not attributable to religion, are mainly due to the peculiar course of English agrarian history.

During the Middle Ages the English countryside, with its open fields cultivated in strips and its wide stretches of common and forest, must have presented very much the same appearance as the neighbouring districts of the Continent, and at the same time England was socially a province of Christendom, sharing in a common civilization, a common art, and common political institutions. The Reformation, however, and the rise of the new landlord class, which had no real parallel in any of the continental countries, launched England on a new path.

It is generally acknowledged that throughout the history of mediaeval art the Church was not only the most generous protectress of the artist, but also the most fruitful source of his inspiration. This is true in a special sense of the art of music. The Church, of course, has always had her own music, namely, the plainsong, which, as Dom Shebbeare wrote in a recent number of Blackfriars, she evolved in the process of evolving a liturgy. Plainsong had been brought to its highest stage of perfection by the beginning of the seventh century, under Saint Gregory I, the great classifier and arranger of the music of the liturgy, but it remained a living musical language for many centuries after the time of the great Pope. As new Feasts were instituted, new music was composed for them, and fresh melodies for the Ordinary Chants of the Mass were written throughout the Middle Ages. All this new liturgical music was written according to the rules of a long-established tradition, but side by side with the unchanging music of the Church, there has existed in Europe for a thousand years another branch of the art, derived from plainsong, yet differing profoundly from it, chiefly by reason of the fact that it has undergone an unending series of changes and developments.

There have been many digressions and regressions, modifications, adaptations, new points of view, new theories on special subjects, in the philosophic world since the days of Berkeley, but, with the exception of Herbert Spencer, no one has attempted to devise a new philosophy outright. Professor Alexander has redeemed our English reputation for originality. Mill is little more than a methodologist, Wm. James and Dr. Schiller have given us a new theory of knowledge, Green adapts Hegel, Bradley introduces further modifications, and criticizes everybody else, Professor Ward has revived Leibnitz, but it has been reserved to Professor Alexander to make a fresh start and to think out a new philosophy ab initio.

The fact that the Aristotelian Society should have allotted four sittings to the discussion of Professor Alexander’s book, testifies to the esteem with which he is regarded in the philosophic world, and also to the importance of the views he sets forth. The reason is apparent. The fundamental reality out of which all evolves is for Professor Alexander space-time. His philosophy, in fact, though not based upon Einstein, nor discussing in detail his theory, may be aptly described as an Einstein-metaphysic.

“Après l’invention du blé, ils voulaient encore vivre A du gland.”

There is a prejudice against primitive survivals. Few men to-day persist in kindling their fires with the flintstock. The devotee who, in the twentieth century, invoked Apollo or prayed to Juno need expect scant sympathy. Manuscripts are no longer copied by hand, now that the printing press is everywhere available. The electric light has put out the feebler glimmers of thousands of tallow candles sufficient for our great-grandparents.

It had to be. We are being shoved along—willy-nilly. It is hard to kick against the pricks. The inventions of to-day leave behind the makeshift contrivances of yesterday. And to-morrow, the something newer that will be offered—at which we shall eagerly snatch—will find us as conceited and as unsatisfied as ever ! Hence the diffidence of many.

Men squatted on the ground until the bright genius arose to whom we owe chairs and sofas. Food was taken up with the fingers before seemliness suggested knives and forks. The strongest male carried off by force his mate until customs of wooing introduced refinements and sentiment into courtship and marriage. Grunts, scowls, nods and imitative gestures were the means of communicating ideas ere the wonders of language revealed a better way. And so forth.