document is brought to him to sign, 'Does this really represent the will of the Young Turks?'

But, if the Young Turks are practically without defects, they suffer from one great misfortune-they lack men. They have no great leader, no fiery demagogue, no clever statesman to tackle the problems as they crop up and to master them as they grow acute. Then the dearth of constructive forces within the movement is ominous. Destructiveness without needless violence they have raised to the level of a fine art. But construction? They have a splendid reputation for reason and moderation. But a nation cannot be governed by reason. We are still waiting for tokens of a new life, of a great accession of strength, for manifestations of creative ardour. As yet the sacred fire that fuses is not kindled.

The unbiassed student of contemporary history might picture to himself the future of the Ottoman Empire in the form of a semi-luminous cloud, whose lustre may derive either from the glories of dawn or the blaze of a conflagration. Gazing on the chain of past events, he will feel unable to shake off the conviction that their consequences are inevitable. Then, as he turns to the miracles wrought by the tact and common-sense of the Young Turks, a more hopeful mood will be gradually induced. Finally, he will suspend his judgment. But optimism is almost universal. For generations a veritable cataclysm has been preparing in Turkey. It was foreseen, foretold, and reckoned with. But on the very eve of doomsday a group of conscientious workers arose, fervent in their zeal against moral and social abuses, hungering for justice, impatient for reform. Thereupon their well-wishers throughout the world began confidently to expect, not a cataclysm, but a political and social millennium. Before their eyes tares had been sowed, yet all at once they hoped to see wheat sprouting up! For had not the gardener been changed?

Meanwhile the problem which recent events have forced to the front is formidable and unmatched elsewhere. If it be happily solved-and we ardently hope it may be history will for the first time put on record a bloodless revolution, subversive and constructive, achieved under adverse circumstances in the face of sinister and most powerful interests, with no genius incarnating the

revolutionary spirit, no galaxy of talents giving direction to the onward march, and a population impregnated with religious and social ideas, with internal national and racial antipathies, which can lend disastrous potency to paralysing opposition.

I mentioned that the problem has no historic parallel among cultural states of modern times. It may be urged that Austria, Russia, and Switzerland offer ready-made solutions of a problem analogous to that with which the Young Turks are now face to face. But, on examination, the likeness will be found to be only apparent. There is no disintegrating element, for instance, in these communities comparable to Islam in the Ottoman Empire; and it may be added, with truth, that the Christian churches also make for disunion. Under the Turkish sway they so far underwent the influence of the conquerors' creed as to take over many functions which appertain exclusively to the State; and these functions they now insist-perhaps reasonably insist on retaining under the name of national privileges. Without being professedly theocratic, the privileged Christian communities copied many of the characteristic features of theocratic Islam. Consequently the social and political materials out of which the constitutional Ottoman Empire has to be fashioned are comparable in that respect, not to those of France in 1789, but to those of Israel in the days of Eli and Samuel. Until political and social institutions, civic duties and military valour, cease to be treated as the outflow of religion, the Empire of the East will continue to be theocratic, even though the shadow of Allah should become still more of a shadow than it is.

As things now are, there is no known type of State to which the Ottoman Empire is advanced enough to conform. Whether the Young Turks who have undertaken the task of regeneration place the principles of nationalism, the interests of religion, or the achievements and strivings of culture at the head and front of their activity, they will be met by difficulties with the vastness of which one is more powerfully impressed than with the assumed efficacy of the means available for surmounting them.

E. J. DILLON.

Art. 13.-TRUTH AND FICTION IN IRISH HISTORY. 1. Die englische Kolonisation in Irland. By Dr M. J. Bonn. Two vols. Stuttgart and Berlin: Cotta, 1906. 2. The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, 1200-1600. By Alice Stopford Green. London: Macmillan, 1908. 3. Elizabethan Ireland (Native and English). By G. B. O'Connor. Dublin: Sealy, 1906.

4. Ireland under Elizabeth. Being a portion of the History of Catholic Ireland,' by Don Philip O'Sullivan Bear. Translated by Matthew J. Byrne. Dublin: Sealy, 1903.

THE question of the relations between Great Britain and Ireland is unfortunately one which continues to possess more than an academic interest for the inhabitants of these islands. The literature of the subject is enormous; no man can hope to master it. Statesmen, historians, poets, journalists, and novelists have all added their quota to it. But still the problem remains. It is a proverb of old date,' said a writer of the fifteenth century; the pride of France, the treason of England, and the war of Ireland shall never have end. Which proverb, touching the war of Ireland, is like alway to continue, without God set it in men's breasts to find some new remedy, that never yet was found before.' To-day the new remedy' still remains to be found. Ireland, 'for the punishment of England,' as we are told, still continues to be the grave of political reputations made elsewhere, to defy the maxims of historical wisdom, and to set at naught the visions of the poet.

It is always interesting to hear what foreigners have to say about us. We cannot forget that it is to a Frenchman, G. de Beaumont, that we owe one of the best books ever written on Ireland. For this reason,

then, if for no other, we are desirous to give a patient hearing to Dr Bonn. But, besides the importance of the subject of which he treats, Dr Bonn has special claims on our attention. The English Colonisation in Ireland' is not the first work on the subject that has come from his pen. He has spent long years meditating on the subject; he knows Ireland and England from personal

experience; and, better still, he sympathises even where he feels called upon to condemn.

According to Dr Bonn, the failure of England to create a permanent English interest in Ireland, as is apparent from the condition of affairs there to-day, was natural and indeed inevitable, inasmuch as the ideal of assimilating Ireland to England in manners, customs, laws, and religion was an impossible and therefore a false ideal. Instead of trying to impress a completely developed English and Protestant civilisation on the natives, English statesmen should, in his opinion, have directed their aim to the education of the 'wild Irish,' and to the development, on the basis of their national characteristics, of an Irish civilisation (ii, 309).

'Die Botschaft hör' ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube.' But the theory is not so novel as Dr Bonn seems to think. It is to be found in every line that Thomas Davis wrote; it permeates modern thought; it has influenced recent Irish legislation; and it finds full expression in the present pseudo-Celtic or Sinn Fein movement. More than this, there was a time in the history of the relations between the two countries, as a careful study of Henry VIII's dealings with Ireland shows, when an effort was made to realise the theory. The effort failed because, on trial, it was found that 'Irish civilisation' was merely synonymous with anarchy. Dr Bonn has written two volumes on the futility of the attempt to civilise Ireland according to English methods. He should have added a third on the special characteristics, as exhibited in history, of Irish civilisation. An imaginary conversation between Shane O'Neill and Sir William Cecil might have proved instructive; it could hardly be lacking in humour.

Seriously, we think Dr Bonn's theory is the product of a rather superficial study of Irish history. For one thing, he has entirely neglected to take into account the effect which the geographical position has had on the relations between the two countries. St George's Channel lies at the root of the Irish problem. As Grattan, in one of his moments of inspiration, said, it is nature's eternal protest against union and separation alike (Speech, January 15, 1800). Severed from Great Britain, but lying, so to speak, at her very elbow, Ireland is herself a geo

graphical unit. With her long stretch of coast-line and her magnificent harbours, she has always had it in her power to be a dangerous neighbour to England. Henry II recognised the fact; so did Henry VIII; so also Elizabeth, Cromwell, Walpole, and Pitt. Each tried to guard against it in his or her own fashion. The plans of each have gone to pieces on the rock of the geographical position. Is it not the belief that the risk is too great, and that no securities are sufficient to counterbalance the geographical position, which lies to-day at the bottom of the opposition to the demand for Home Rule? It is not racial hatred, nor a superstitious belief in their own form of civilisation, nor commercial jealousy, nor even religious bigotry, that has in the main dictated the policy of repression pursued by Englishmen towards Ireland; it is the instinct of self-preservation.

The seductiveness of such theories as that put forward by Dr Bonn consists in their nebulous character. Grievously as England has sinned against the Irish, meaning the Celtic or native element in the nation, she has sinned quite as grievously against her own flesh and blood. Take the great landmarks of the history of Ireland-her rebellions. If we except Shane and Hugh O'Neill, every great rebel, from the days of 'Silken Thomas' to those of Charles Stewart Parnell, has been of English descent. The reason is not far to seek; but the fact alone ought to give pause to such sweeping generalisations as that which lies at the bottom of Dr Bonn's theory. On the other hand, however, we entirely agree with Dr Bonn in the importance he attaches to the destruction of the clan system. It is a point that has been almost overlooked by historians. No one, we venture to say, can read the history of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries without a feeling of shame and sorrow. The sufferings entailed on the native Irish by the destruction of the clan system were simply awful. And yet, if we are not mistaken, the destruction of the clan system was nevertheless, humanly speaking, a necessary step towards the establishment of a higher and more developed form of national life.

The nineteenth century has seen the rise of a new Irish nation. Two factors have gone to build up that nation, namely, the destruction of the tribal system and