not allow him to respond to the to govern an empire? As we gigantic events of the closing years of his reign." The advisers upon whom he had a right to depend, failed him, and no man can govern a country without the loyal support of others. The Liberals, who thought that the Duma might serve them and their world, hastened the day of revolution, and then were unable to check it or to control it. He fell, not through his own fault, and with his fall there fell, perhaps never to recover, the great empire of Russia.

Even if it had not made certain the passage of a useful measure, the debate on the second reading of the Trade Unions Bill would have served an admirable purpose. For it showed us more clearly than ever before the stuff of which the Labour Party is made. The leaders of the Opposition, with the single exception of Mr Snowden, proved themselves bankrupt in thought, bankrupt in argument, as their followers proved themselves bankrupt in manners and selfcontrol. It is not an effective method of controversy to shoût "Liar across the House of Commons. The members of the Labour Party who bawled and cried, because they did not know how to debate, advanced neither their cause nor the argument. Is it among such men as these that we must look for leadership? Shall those who cannot govern themselves or their tongues claim

have said, Mr Snowden alone spoke intelligibly and intelligently. He understood the case of his opponents, and he treated it like the wise advocate that he is; and though he did his best to damage the Bill of the Government, he had the courage to say things about strikes, general and other, that were unpalatable to his own Party. For the rest, poor Mr Clynes made a sorry mess of it, and Mr Thomas, as usual, spoke like a tub-thumper who could not make up his mind. Mr George Spencer, on the other hand, made a speech that will long be remembered. It was perfect in courage and sincerity, and bitterly as it annoyed the back benches of Labour, even they dared not bay their disapproval; but Mr Spencer has been violently expelled from their ranks, to his own satisfaction no doubt, and the credit of his allegiance belongs to others. This, then, is the result of the debate: the Labour Party mistook noise for reason throughout, and in a debate, in which general strikes played a foremost part, could not make up its sad mind whether there had really been a general strike last year or not.

It is part of the prevailing vulgarity that men should thrust themselves, or be thrust by others, into positions for which they are obviously unfit. The same irrelevance may be noticed in literature as in politics. Not many weeks since,

upon St George's Day, and at on his way, speaking in every Stratford-on-Avon, Shake- language, and carrying delight speare's own birthplace, amid into every land, and becoming the unfurling, partially success- the master of every stage, the ful, of many flags, much incense last drop of advertisement, was burned before the shrine of thinks the showman, has not the poet. And the phrase been squeezed out of his poetry which, after the speeches had and of his fame. He must be been made and forgotten, lingers forced, by sheer racket, into in our memory is that the time every home; he must be had come to "boost Shakes- cracked up, to use the phrase peare." To boost Shakespeare! of the immortal Hannibal CholNo man that ever lived is in lop, until no ear is deaf to the less need of boosting than echo of his name. In other Shakespeare. Не had the words, in his own despite, he supreme good - fortune in his must be boosted, and they who lifetime to win the success are content to read him in he wanted and to escape the their studies, or to take the oppressive notice of the crowd. rare opportunities that are It was not for him to hear given them of hearing him on his the stage, must stand in an outraged silence while the megaphone and the limelight do their worst. Shakespeare "boosted!" A famous booster has undertaken to do the job, and the result, no doubt, will be solid moneymoney to be spent in the futile attempt to make him ridiculous who hitherto has defied ridicule. What will be

name shouted aloud in the street, or to be followed in the streets by noisy worshippers. He did not, like some of his successors, cut antics in public places that gaping onlookers might ask one another, "Who is the mountebank?' The orator, intent to boost the poet, in whom he surmised that there was a gold-mine, gave the worst possible answer to Matthew Arnold's sonnet :“And thou, who did'st the stars and

sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-hon-
our'd, self-secure,

Did'st tread on earth unguessed at-
Better so!"

must

be

the process of boosting is as
yet uncertain. The boost will
probably be achieved by the
films and the wireless. These
are the two great labour-saving
inventions of modern times.
The human being of to-day
finds it too great a
upon his (or her) nerves to
look and to listen at the same
time. So the films and the
wireless come to his aid. The
cinema shows him what he

great a strain

Better so, said Arnold. The booster does not agree with him. He will guess at every riddle; he is ready to pierce every mystery. And though Shakespeare, ever since his death, has gone triumphantly cannot hear, and broadcasting

lets him hear what he cannot hundreds of faithful readers see, and while the power of remain, they will keep alight advertisement is doubled, only the torch of understanding, one sense is asked to attend and hand it on devoutly instead of two. Thus will the trimmed to those who come boosting of Shakespeare begin. after them. A pleasant little story of the courtship of Anne Hathaway will be shown upon the screen, and the truth of his skill in deer-stealing will be sent broadcast over the world. No longer will it be necessary to read his plays or to hear them spoken laboriously upon the stage. Advertisement will do what is necessary, and when the poet has been boosted widely enough, we shall find thousands subscribing to build another theatre at Stratford who have never read a line of his works and are never likely to see the curtain drawn up on any one of his plays.

Yet we would rather that a new theatre should never rise upon the ashes of the old than that the poet should be made sadly familiar by the advertising tricks of to-day. What did he know of "boosting," who sedulously escaped the notice of his fellows? How he must smile in Paradise when he looks down upon the feverish anxiety of those who, laboriously scratching in the dustheap, would give his works to Bacon or to William Stanley. And we are not sure that the showman, who would remind a careless generation by blowing the trumpet and beating the drum that Shakespeare once lived and wrote, is not the worst enemy that the poet has encountered. So long as a few

There is little enough to be said in praise of those adventurous spirits who would "boost Shakespeare. There is nothing, save condemnation, to mete out to those who would attempt to gain notoriety by writing travesties of the Gospel. One travesty has already appeared, The Man Nobody Knows' (London: Constable), which has been reprinted three or four times in the last six months, and more are promised. It is a vile practice thus to bring ridicule upon a narrative held sacred by many thousands of sincere men and women, and the sooner it is put a stop to the better will it be. At the end of the seventeenth century it was thought amusing to put the heroes of Virgil and Homer into the costume of the time, and to fill their mouths with tavern slang. Not much harm was done, except to the taste of those who read the works of Charles Cotton and his rivals. But the heroes of the Eneid' were fitter subjects of burlesque than Jesus and his disciples, and there is no excuse whatever to be found for the flippancy, the ignorance, and the vulgarity of the author of 'The Man Nobody Knows.' He is himself an advertiser for an insurance company, or has been, so he tells us, and he sees and describes the events of two

thousand years ago in the terms respectfully reviewed and sold of Wall Street. His jargon is by the thousand. Had it not the jargon of the North Ameri- received the reward of a wide can Stock Exchange, and in publicity, it had it had not been every phrase that he uses, he noticed here. outrages the proprieties of time and place. Nowhere else, save in one or two books on the Bible written by compatriots of this author, can we match his impudent slang. You may find examples of his vulgarity and ineptitude upon any page, and one example might serve as well as another; but perhaps his masterpiece in this kind is his sketch of Judas, which will give our readers a clear idea of the American method. "Not a bad fellow at heart, he had the virtues and the weakness of the smallbore business man. He was 'hard-boiled,' and proud of it; he 'looked out for Number One.' It was no easy job being treasurer for a lot of idealists, Judas would have you know. He held the bag, and gave every cent a good tight squeeze before he let it pass. When the grateful woman broke her box of costly ointment over Jesus' feet the other disciples thought it was fine, but he knew better. 'Pretty wasteful business,' he grumbled to himself. The big talk of the others about thrones' and 'kingdoms' and 'victory' did not fool him; he could read a balance-sheet, and he knew the jig was up." Thus the author of 'The Man Nobody Knows' allows his "humour" to crawl like a slug over the greatest narrative in the world, and his comic Testament is

He calls his book 'The Man Nobody Knows,' and if he implies by his title that nobody knows Jesus, he should place himself first among the ignorant. Being a business man, he cannot but cast the Jesus that he pretends to know in any other mould than his own. He calls Jesus "the Founder of Business." He accepts in a literal and a modern sense the words which Jesus spoke in reply to his mother, who had sought him sorrowing : Wist ye not that I must be about my father's business? Upon these words he establishes his argument about Jesus, and seeks parallels to Him in George W. Perkins, Theodore N. Vail, and other heroes of finance. He finds no justification for this irrelevancy either in the English of the Authorised Version, or in the Greek of the Gospels. The translators of King James's version did not use the word "business in the American sense; and the author of the travesty, had he consulted the Greek text (ev TOîs TOû πaтρÓS μov), which may mean simply ""in my Father's house," would have found no warrant for his monstrous interpretation. Truly it is but nonsense that he talks, and nonsense offensive to those who have appreciated the quiet selflessness of the Gospels. And the worst is not yet. Now that Jesus has been represented as