a terrific report, and the tank, Mr. Grafton, and all those German officers in and near it were blown into a thousand bits. Tommy and I were a good fifty yards away, and were knocked over by the explosion. When we recovered we looked round, and there was a torn and ruined mass of metal, and one or two tattered groaning forms, in the remains of swagger uniforms, lying around. The rest, every mother's son of them, had been blown to Kingdom Come.'

Sommers gave a long-drawn 'Ah!' when Smithers finished speaking.

'It was Graf's own idea,' he said softly. 'He told me about it. A dynamite charge hidden in the bottom of

Chambers's Journal

the tank and operated electrically by a push button. He told me he had fitted one to his own tank, and had written home recommending them to be fitted to all tanks, so that they could be blown up in case of danger of capture. Poor old Graf! He was a gallant gentleman.'

'Sommers, I misjudged your friend,' said Travers, and his voice was a little husky. I apologize. Have you a match?' and lighting a cigarette he walked off.

The rest of us went our several ways, and for my part I wondered whether, placed as 'The Count' had been, I should have had the pluck to act as he had done.

WE are disposed to think that among all the attempts to describe the soul of the war and of the society that made and endured it, only that of the painter and the draughtsman arrives at truth. Examine any collection of war paintings and drawings by representative artists.* In the main they suggest nothing so much as a series of illustrations of Mr. Wells's imaginative pictures of the coming world. Their subject is not man, but his handiwork; not soldiers but the 'things' that soldiers use. Reduced to form they appear in vast intricacies of girders and spans, in white sheets of flame from roaring furnaces, in colossal hammers, in the bulk of huge transports, in the rush of destroyers through rough seas, in the shouts of monster guns pointing skywards. The next effort of the artist is to show what these 'things' produce. Here, again, men hardly appear. All that is seen is wreckage - the splinters of trees, or the huge dents of shell-holes on the earth's surface. The human agents, soldiers or workers, look like ants in an ants' colony, or figures from a child's storehouse of toys. They are minders and tenders of machines; creators in the first instance, but preeminently and finally creatures of what they have made.

diminishing feature of industrialism; on the contrary, it continually increases. And it is only perceived by the worker. Thus, for the London traveler the 'tubes' are merely a swift and easy form of transport. What do they represent, say, to the 'operator' of a lift? Insufferable monotony. Work in an Algerian slave-galley would be lightsome in comparison. It is impossible, therefore, to deny the lift-worker an interval of relief, not only at the close of his tale of hours, but in the middle of it. Nor can you fail to apply this call for relief from strain to a system which has been subject for four years to the unceasing and accumulating exigencies of war. Thoughtless people, including, it would appear, the Government, see the workmen in a condition of willingness to run the industrial machine at high pressure whenever the demand for more effort is made on them. But men are not like that. To the mass of the workmen the war was a condition of overwork, unaccompanied by many of the reliefs which trade unionism secures for them. The apparent cause of strain disappears, yet the strain continues and is intensified. They revolt; here and there they disobey their leaders, disregard the terms of their engagements, or try to blackmail the public. Servants of the war, and obedient to its mechanical scheme, they break loose, with its close, into the ensuing reign of freedom.

The collection at the Mansard Gallery will serve very well.

chine which consciously or unconsciously dictates the strike policy of the hour. The instinct is natural and human. Miners, engineers, railwaymen, all want more leisure: that is, a constant mental reaction from the

Mr. George made the mistake of his life when he enthroned a master capitalist in almost everyone of the centres of industrial control. He would have been wiser to refuse to govern at all save on the condition that Labor had at least half the responsibility. For the capitalist system cannot remain as it is, and a way of modification must be

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found. We may call the Labor movement selfish, thoughtless, impatient, what we will. But it has hold of a great truth. It knows that mechanical force has almost destroyed the life of man in Europe. And it wants to get this blind power in hand, subject at least to the general will and conscience.

a smoke in the offing, and from the reply to his quick question learned that it was a ship propelled by steam? After all, then, if he had not listened to his savants, who, after their manner, had pronounced steamships to be impossible, he might have laughed at the obstinate winds which had kept him at Boulogne, and pounced on England in the night! The vision of conquest flared up in Napoleon's imagination, and died down in bitter thoughts. That was what the smoke on the horizon meant to him. But it was such an apparition as might have haunted Ruskin all his life the small black cloud in the distance, which meant the coming of the Age of Steam. To him it was a presage of miasma overspreading Europe; it portended not only things he

abhorred and lamented the pollution of pure streams, the desecration of lovely valleys, the decay of husbandry, the desertion of the countryside, the coagulation of people in huge sooty towns overshadowed by monstrous factories it portended also things that, consequent on these, moved him even more deeply and wrung from him burning speech-poisonings of the heart and mind, the degradation of art, the apotheosis of commerce, the material glut and spiritual famine of industrial England.

But it was only by degrees that the stark vision of the Dragon was revealed, against which, a new St. George, he was destined to go forth to fight, and to spend his strength and substance fighting. The Dragon was to grow up with him; its force was not full grown till his own powers were ripened and his weapon sharpened for the unending contest. The era of worldshaking events, of war-convulsed Europe, of feverish action and dazzling campaigns, had closed abruptly on the field of Waterloo. With the eclipse of Napoleon came deaths like those of Byron, Keats, and Shelley, as if to symbolize the passing of the glory of youth.

The world went drab. Exhausted by her immense struggle, England withdrew into herself, concentrating energy on industry and invention. If for long there was misery and want among the people, manufacturers grew rich; railways were developed at a burst; the resources of the country exploited as never before. England was gradually entering on a period of material prosperity unparalleled. These were the times in which Ruskin grew to manhood.

Why does the early Victorian era seem so queerly remote to us now? Why is it that we seem more at home in the eighteenth century, and in other periods much more removed in time? To take externals only: though crinolines and flowing whiskers may begin to take on a charm of distance, we cannot conceive ourselves happy with Victorian furniture; yet we copy and covet the interiors of Reynolds's and Johnson's time. But in the mental atmosphere, too, we feel, after the age that went before, a loss of breadth and naturalness and frankness: the horizon is contracted; England seems to have lost touch with the outer world of Europe; and never were the arts of a great nation in so degraded a condition. Miseries and horrors underlay the glitter of new wealth, with its ingrained complacency. Yet, in spite of all the smugness and accepted vulgarity, never was an age more resolutely indicted by its great men, or by some at least among them. And of these the most eloquent was Ruskin. His protest lasts; we have need of it to-day.

None of the eminent Victorians won fame and recognition earlier than Ruskin. He fascinated an immense audience. But there were vicissitudes in his fame. Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice irritated the circle of old-fashioned cognoscenti and scandalized the professional architects; but they took the reading world by storm;

and before long Ruskin's teaching, revolutionary in many respects as it seemed, was soaking into the minds of young enthusiasts; it bore practical fruit, as we know, in painting, and still more in architecture. For a period he was accepted as an oracle on all matters of art. Then began the series of books on social reform and political economy; and now it was the political economists who were scandalized in their turn. 'Of course, as a writer on art he is magnificent; let him stick to what he knows; of our science he knows nothing and talks folly.' Thus said the economists. But it so happened that by this time a change had come over the world of art: Ruskin was voted oldfashioned and out-of-date, his authority had declined, and soon it was the artists and art critics who were saying, 'Of course, as a political economist he is splendid; but no one could accept his teaching about art.' And since his death there have been symptoms of a tendency, here and there, to regard Ruskin as a man who, so far as the substance of his message went, had fallen between two stools; though his reputation could still be saved, for no one could deny that he was a great writer. But mere eloquence will save no man. It is impossible to disengage Ruskin's eloquence and the felicities of his style from the matter that moved him to write. And more and more it will be perceived that the doctrine he uttered, the faith that inspired him, was of a single substance, whether his subject was rocks and plants, or painting and architecture, or housing and wages, or religion and ethics. He was driving all one way. What he had to say about political economy was the same as what he had to say about art; the one was implied in the other. He was something more than a critic of art, more than a naturalist, more than a political economist; he was an in