The result of the French general elections has been to overthrow not only M. Poincare, who had the goodwill of the great Catholic soldiers like Foch and Castelnau and Gouraud and Mangin, but also M. Millerand, who has been particularly connected with the restoration of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. They are now replaced by a group of politicians who have been regarded by those Catholic generals, and by most French nationalists, as their determined and dangerous enemies. These new leaders of France have, moreover, stated quite clearly in their public manifestoes that the immediate rupture of diplomatic relations with the Catholic Church is one of the principal planks in their programme. Their attitude in this respect is all the more disquieting because a rupture with the Vatican is almost the only part of their policy which they can bring into operation at once without fresh legislation. Their record in regard to the Vatican is, moreover, consistent and logical, and they have demanded so often in recent years that diplomatic relations with the Pope should be broken off that they cannot be expected to forget their previous declarations on the subject. It is, unfortunately, a question upon which they also feel very strongly, just as the Labour Party here felt strongly on the question of recognising the Bolsheviks; so that the rupture with the Vatican would seem likely to be their first public action, just as the recognition of Moscow was the first action of the British Labour Government.

In early non-Catholic days one of the men to whom I gave a boy’s devotion was George MacDonald, poet, novelist, preacher, the centenary of whose birth falls to be observed this year. Occasionally he was a guest at our house; at other times I heard him lecture in different parts of London or met him in the home of a neighbour whom he sometimes visited. His books were devoured with the uncritical voracity of the youthful hero-worshipper. It was with special interest, therefore, that I turned to the biography which his son has just published.

Mr. Chesterton, in the introduction which he supplies, contrasts George MacDonald with Carlyle. The latter, he says, never lost the Puritan mood even when he lost the whole of the Puritan theology. So far, however, in Mr. Chesterton’s estimation, did MacDonald escape the Calvinism of his early surroundings that he says of him ‘in his particular type of literary work he did indeed realise the apparent paradox of a St. Francis of Aberdeen, seeing the same sort of halo round every flower and bird. It is not the same thing (he continues) as any poet’s appreciation of the beauty of the flower or bird. A heathen can feel that and remain a heathen, or in other words, remain sad. It is a certain special sense of significance, which the tradition that most values it calls sacramental. To have got back to it or forward to it, at one bound of boyhood, out of the black Sabbath of a Calvinist town, was a miracle of imagination.’

The establishment of such an economic order is demanded not only by external circumstances but also by a human need.

In almost all the industrial countries the wage labourer is thoroughly disaffected. For almost a century he has been fed on the doctrines of political liberalism. He has been taught to believe in democracy, in the equal citizenship of all, and it is not surprising that he should have come at last to demand the application of these theories to his daily life— that is to economic matters. Hence the determination of organised labour to acquire a fixed standard of life, secure from the fluctuations of the international market. Hence too its tendency to look for the satisfaction of these ideals to Socialism, which had its birth at the time when the prospects of the working classes seemed most desperate, and which has shown itself ready to step into the place of the old governments in the political disintegration of Europe that has followed the world war.

The Socialist doctrines, especially in their ‘Scientific’ Marxian form, in spite of being a conscious revolt against the prevailing economic theories, nevertheless took over from the older economists their materialistic outlook, and their faith in the operation of unmodifiable economic laws. They simply added to these fundamental conceptions a theory of historical evolution, by which they taught that the capitalist system was a necessary stage in the development of the individual handicrafts of the past into the scientific socialised industrialism of the future.

Before the days of ‘Mr. Sludge the Medium,’ fashionable folk had a sentimental leaning towards polite correspondence from vanished friends, who had gone to a better, or, at least, another world.

Proof of this is afforded in a delightfully languishing volume, published in 1824, the work of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, entitled Friendship in Death, in Letters from the Dead to the Living, with a frontispiece illustrated by two radiating tombstones. The volume is dedicated to Dr. Young, and the lady writes with great humility:

The retiring Mrs. Rowe will give some entertainment of a non-serious kind to the frivolous but harmless. Letter II, for example, from a Gentleman who died at Constantinople, to his friend in England, giving him an account of his death, is ingeniously diverting. Altamont tells his crony, Beville, how he passed away, and awoke in a genteel world, where his ladylove welcomed him with all the grace of a woman of fashion :

None of his friends were prepared for the sudden change in him. And yet there was no doubt that he had completely changed, almost beyond recognition. His cynical temper had gone, his overbearing manner had disappeared, his repellent selfishness had vanished. He had become gentle, courteous, self-effacing. The amazing thing about it was that it had happened suddenly.

In fact we did not realise all at once what had happened. It dawned upon us gradually. And then we saw that the change itself had not been gradual, but only our perception of it. We were expecting the old sneering tone, the usual hard, cold, unsympathetic selfishness, and we were unprepared for the transformation. We refrained from making any remark about it in his hearing lest he should feel ashamed and return to his former unpleasant manner.

One evening, however, some of us at the Century Club were discussing the subject of dreams and their connection with the subliminal consciousness, when he strolled in. I was surprised to see him there, for he was an unsociable fellow and I had forgotten that he was a member of the Club. He wandered up to where we were sitting and overheard part of our conversation. Presently he remarked, in a tone which none of us could possibly have resented :

A very portly volume on Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition, by Rafael Sabatini, at the cost of twelve shillings and sixpence, has gone into its third edition. The publishers on the jacket of the book tell us that ‘it deals without bias and in a purely historical spirit with this phase of religious persecution.’ Certainly a book without bias dealing with the Inquisition must needs be written ‘in a purely historical spirit,’ and no doubt in time such a book will get written. But it is nonsense to speak of Mr, Rafael Sabatini as having already written it. You feel that he wants to be an historian, and that he is trying desperately hard to be without bias; but the result of his efforts is unhappy.

Of course, no one is biassed nowadays in favour of the Inquisition; so that Mr. Sabatini can be sure that he has it all his own way when he denounces its cruelty, its stupidity, its failure. Persecution has hardly ever been successful except to the persecuted, as we know in England in our own case: and Catholics who have suffered persecution at the hands of their countrymen in the past know enough of its folly to have little sympathy with the efforts of the Inquisition of Spain. Yet we have known also enough in our own time of the panic dread of German spies, of hostility to the Jews in many classes of society, of the American habit of applying torture to certain cases that fall under its police law, to be sure that the spirit that begat the Inquisition is alive, though normally very feebly alive, in all human nature.