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sistency in principle can be attributed to any one of the disputants. The conflicts between jurists as to the application of the principles involved have not been more marked than the inconsistent practices under which the same State has not only enforced one policy at one time and another at another, but has actually placed conflicting lists of contraband articles in different treaties almost at the same moment.

If arms and munitions of war are contraband by the common consent of nations, it is no extreme extension of principle to associate with them the materials out of which, and the machinery by which, they are fabricated. While such is not the accepted usage of all nations, it is certainly the general practice of Great Britain and the United States so to regard them. On the same general principle, saltpetre and sulphur have generally been included in the contraband list, and in the same category must be placed the materials necessary in the manufacture of the other various kinds of explosives created of late by the ingenious hand of modern invention.

In some of the treaties of the seventeenth century articles of naval construction were expressly included, while in others they were expressly excluded. In the absence of express treaty stipu. lation, such articles were not then contraband under the general law of na tions. Sharply as Great Britain and France have disagreed as to naval stores, they have united in regarding horses as contraband. In 1870, Count Bismarck complained that the "export of horses from England under existing circumstances provided the enemy of Prussia with the means of carrying on a war with a power in amity with Great Britain.

Although the introduction of the use of coal into vessels of war began early in the last century, the Crimean War was the first maritime struggle of im

portance in which such vessels were propelled by steam power. Thus, confronted by new conditions, Great Britain, after stopping coals on the way to a Russian port, applied to them, as an article ancipitis usus, her doctrine of conditional contraband. When the question again rose in 1859, in the war between Austria, on the one hand, and France and Piedmont, on the other, the Foreign Office warned British merchants that "it appears, however, to Her Majesty's Government that, having regard to the present state of naval armaments, coal may, in many cases, be rightly held to be contraband of war, and, therefore, that all who engage in the traffic must do so at a risk, from which Her Majesty's Government cannot relieve them." When the royal neutrality proclamation, issued upon the outbreak of the American Civil War, came under discussion in the House of Lords, Lord Brougham remarked that coal might be contraband, "if furnished to one belligerent to be used in warfare against the other," and Lord Kingdown said that “if coals are sent to a port where there are war steamers, with a view of supplying them, they become contraband."

With regard to provisions, Vattel says, "commodities particularly useful in war, and the importation of which to an enemy are prohibited, are called contraband goods. Such are arms, ammunition, timber for shipbuilding, any kind of naval stores, horses, and even provisions, in certain junctures, when we have hopes of reducing the enemy by famine." Money, metals, cotton, and clothing, although not in themselves contraband, may become sq under circumstances substantially the same as those that impart to provisions a noxious character. While money may be lawfully sent to a belligerent country for the purchase of goods or for the payment of debts, its consignment for the purpose of assisting bellig

erent operations authorizes its treat ment as contraband.

Before the principle was settled that the damage to a belligerent from contraband trade results from the nature of the goods conveyed, and not from the fact of transport, it was the ancient practice to confiscate both ship and cargo. The milder modern practice of confiscating the contraband goods only is one of the notable developments of international trade in the seventeenth century. A relic of the earlier practice survives, however, in the rule which still condemns the vessel if the contraband cargo belongs to

The Economist.

its owner. If the owner of the contraband articles is part-owner of the ship, his share in her is also forfeited. If a neutral vessel is bound by a treaty of its own country to abstain from the act in question, the vessel is condemned for the act, although the cargo be not the property of its owner. If there is a resort to fraudulent devices, such as false papers and false destination, for the purpose of defeating the right of search, or deceiving the searching officers, the vessel becomes subject to confiscation as well as the contraband cargo.

THOMAS HARDY AS PANORAMATIST.

Eight years ago "Jude the Obscure" was published. Since then Mr. Hardy has given us two or three volumes of poetry, and now a volume of drama,1 but no other novel. One assumes that he has ceased as a novelist. Why has he ceased? The reason is generally said to be that he was disheartened by the many hostile criticisms of "Jude the Obscure." To accept that explanation were to insult him. A puny engine of art may be derailed by such puny obstacles as the public can set in its way. So strong an engine as Mr. Hardy rushes straight on, despite them, never so little jarred by them, and stops not save for lack of inward steam. Mr. Hardy writes no more novels because he has no more novels to write.

A fascinating essay could be written on the autumnal works of great writers. Sooner or later, there comes for the great writer a time when he feels that his best work is done-that the fire in him has sunk to a glow. And then, 1 "The Dynasts. a drama of the Napoleonic Wars," by Thomas Hardy. (Macmillan.)

instinctively, he shrinks from the form in which he cast the works of his youth and of his prime, and from the themes he then loved best. But he cannot be idle-the fire still glows. Other forms, other themes, occur to him and are grasped by him. In Eng. land, during recent years, great writers in their autumn have had a rather curious tendency: they have tended to write either about Napoleon or about Mrs. Meynell. The late Mr. Coventry Patmore wrote about Mrs. Meynell. Meredith has written both about Mrs. Meynell and about Napoleon. Mr. Hardy now readjusts the balance, confining himself to Napoleon. So far,

Mr.

his procedure is quite normal: a new theme, through a new form. But I mislead you when I speak of Mr. Hardy as "confining himself to Napoleon." "Excluding Mrs. Meynell" would be more accurate. He is so very comprehensive. Pitt, Sheridan, Nelson, George III., and, throughout Europe everyone who played a notable part during the First Empire-here they all are, in

company with various spirits, shades and choruses, marshalled into the scope of six acts and thirty-five scenes. Nor has Mr. Hardy done with them yet. This book is but a third of his scheme. The trilogy will comprise nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes. Prodigious, is it not? And it marks its schemer as (in the stricter sense of the word) a prodigy. Normally, the great writer, forsaking the form of his greatness, gravitates to littler forms. theme may be great or little, but he treats it within a little compass. Hardy's vitality would seem to have diminished only for his own special form. At any rate, it is such that he believes it sufficient for an attack on the illimitable and the impossible.

The

Mr.

Impossible his task certainly is. Το do perfectly what he essays would need a syndicate of much greater poets than ever were born into the world, working in an age of miracles. To show us the whole world, as seen, in a time of stress, by the world that is unseen by us! Whoever so essays must be judged according to the degree by which his work falls infinitely short of perfection. Mr. Hardy need not fear that test. "The Dynasts" is a noble achievement, impressive, memorable.

To say that it were easy to ridicule such a work is but a tribute to the sublimity of Mr. Hardy's intent, and to the newness and strangeness of his means. It is easy to smile at sight of all these great historic figures reduced to the size of marionettes. I confess that I, reading here the scene of the death of Nelson, was irresistibly reminded of the same scene as erst beheld by me, at Brighton, through the eyelet of a peep-show, whose proprietor strove to make it more realistic for me by saying in a confidential tone "'Ardy, 'Ardy, I am wounded, 'Ardy.-Not mortially, I 'ope, my lord?-Mortially, I fear, 'Ardy." The dialogue here is of a different and much worthier kind; yet

the figures seem hardly less tiny and unreal. How could they be life-sized and alive, wedged into so small a compass between so remote and diverse scenes? Throughout this play the only characters who stand to human height, drawing the breath of life, are the Wessex peasants. "When," says Mr. Hardy in his preface, ""The Trumpet Major' was printed, more than twenty years ago, I found myself in the tantalizing position of having touched the fringe of a vast international tragedy without being able, through limits of plan, knowledge, and opportunity, to enter further into its events; a restriction that prevailed for many years." Well, that restriction has vanished. But remains the difference between a writer's power to project the particular thing which he has known lovingly in youth and his power to project the general thing which he has studied in maturity. For my own part, I wish these Wessex peasants had been kept out of "The Dynasts." They mar the unity of an effect which is, in the circumstances, partially correct. The general effect of littleness does, without doubt, help the illusion which Mr. Hardy seeks to create. That miraculous syndicate of which I dreamed anon would have kept the figures as tiny as here they seemas tiny, but all alive, like real men and women beheld from a great distance.

Pushing ingenuity a step further, one might even defend the likeness of these figures to automata. For Mr. Hardy's aim is to show them, not merely as they appear to certain supernal, elemental spirits, but also as blindly obedient to an Immanent Will, which

works unconsciously, as heretofore,

Eternal artistries in Circumstance, Whose patterns, wrought by rapt æsthetic rote

Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,

And not their consequence.

From the Overworld the Spirit of the Years watches the eternal weaving of this pattern. The Spirit Ironic watches, too, smiling. The Spirit Sinister, too, watches laughing. There is a Spirit of the Pities; but she is young, as Mr. Hardy insists, and quite helpless. Beneath them "Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. . . . The point of view then sinks downwards through space, and draws near to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the peoples, distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing, crawling, heaving, and vibrating in their various cities and nationalities. . . . A new and penetrating light descends, enduing men and things with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as one organism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity." The Spirits draw nearer still to earth. They flit over the English ground, near the open Channel. A stage-coach passes. "See now," says one of the passengers to another, "how the Channel and coast open out like a chart. . . . One can see half across to France up here." The irony of this contrast between their vision and the vision just vouchsafed to us strikes the keynote of the whole drama. How ridiculous that historic debate in the House of Commons! Sheridan thundering at Pitt, and Pitt at Sheridan, and above them in the gallery, in the guise of human Strangers, those abstract Spirits, sitting till they are "spied" by an officious Member! Anon these Spirits are in the cathedral of Milan. Napoleon, in all his trappings, places the crown of Lombardy upon his brow. Before him the Cardinal Archbishop swings a censer. The organ peals an anthem. "What," asks the Spirit of the Pities, "is the creed that these rich rites disclose?" And the Spirit of the Years answers

A local thing called Christianity, Which the wild dramas of this wheeling sphere

Include, with divers other such, in dim, Pathetical, and brief parentheses.

...

The Imperial procession passes out to the palace. "The exterior of the cathedral is seen, but the point of view recedes, the whole fabric smalling into distance and becoming like a rare, delicately-carved ornament. The city itself sinks to miniature, the Alps show afar as a white corrugation . . . clouds cover the panorama," and our next sight is of the dockyard at Gibraltar. Thus we range hither and thither, with the Spirits, listening to their reflections on the infinite littleness and helplessness and unmeaning of all things here below. We see, at last, the toy field of Austerlitz, and the toy death-bed of Pitt. Thereat the book closes, looking strangely like a duodecimo.

The book closes, and (so surely has it cast its spell on us) seems a quité fugitive and negligible little piece of work. We wonder why Mr. Hardy wrote it; or rather, one regrets that the Immanent Will put him to the trouble of writing it. "Wot's the good of anythink? Wy, nothink" was the refrain of a popular coster-song some years ago, and Mr. Hardy has set it ringing in our ears again. But presently the mood passes. And, even as in the stage-directions of "The Dynasts" we see specks becoming mountain-tops, so do we begin to realize that we have been reading a really great book. An imperfect book, as I have said-inevitably imperfect. And less perfect than it might quite easily have been. That Mr. Hardy is a poet, in the large sense of the word, nobody will dare deny. But his poetry expresses itself much more surely and finely through the medium of prose than through the medium of rhyme and metre. I wish he had done "The Dynasts" in prose, of which he has a mastery, rather than in a

form wherein he has to wrestle-sometimes quite successfully—for his effects. No one, again, will deny that Mr. Hardy is, in the large sense of the word, a dramatist. But his drama expresses itself better through narration than through dialogue and stage-directions. He writes here not for the stage; and, except an eye to the stage, there is no reason or excuse for using a form which must always (be our dramatic imagination never so vivid) hamper and harass us in the study. But, when every reservation has been made, "The Dynasts" is still a great book. It is absolutely new in that it is the first modern work of dramatic fiction in which free-will is denied to the characters. Free-will is supposed to be a thing necessary to human interest. If it were so indeed, we should get no exThe Saturday Review.

citement from Homer. Not that Mr. Hardy's negation resembles Homer's. Achilles and the rest were life-sized puppets, whose strings were being pulled, at near hand, by gods scarcely larger than they. Mr. Hardy's puppets are infinitesimal-mere "electrons," shifted hither and thither, for no reason, by some impalpable agency. Yet they are exciting. Free-will is not necessary to human interest. Belief in it is, however, necessary to human life. Cries Mr. Hardy's Spirit of the Pities

"This tale of Will And Life's impulsion by Incognizance I cannot take."

Nor can I. But I can take and treasure, with all gratitude, the book in which that tale is told so finely.

Max Beerbohm.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Little, Brown & Co. announce a new romance, "Anna the Adventuress," by E. Phillips Oppenheim, author of "A Prince of Sinners."

Miss Josephine Daskam's "Memoirs of a Baby," which has been running as a serial in Harper's Bazar, will soon be published in book form.

The sale of the original manuscript of the first book of Milton's "Paradise

Lost" ended in the "lot" being bought in for $25,000. The highest bid was $23,750.

Miss Hannah Lynch, author of "French Life in Town and Country" and the "Autobiography of a Child," and an incisive writer for Blackwood's and other English magazines and re

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It is thirty years since I had the honor of an invitation to dinner from Sir Charles and Lady Lyell to meet Mr. Herbert Spencer. The day before, Sir Charles called, and I told him I was quite ignorant of the writings of the could professor, and asked if he lend me some small work which might give me an idea of his line of thought. In the evening a footman arrived with twelve large volumes, and I heard it was a joke in the scientific world that Mrs. Robert Crawshay thought to get up Herbert Spencer in twenty-four hours. I subsequently read his "First Principles" and "Social Statics" with great delight, but his "Psychology" baffled me. I once asked him to dine with me, naming the one or two friends

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