less true, as Sir Henry Maine once argued, that the pathology of party conflict is as susceptible now as in other realms and ages to the analysis Machiavelli made: certainly, the 'boss' of an American State or city has recognisable kinship with the condottiere of 16thcentury Italy. Parties will attain power by fraud and deliberate deceit; but what is important in the modern democratic State is the fact that they cannot hope by those means to retain power for long. Government by discussion engenders a capacity for self-regeneration to which no other system, however powerful in appearance, can pretend. It is, of course, vital that the discussion shall be free; and it is not less urgent that men should be prepared to abide by its results. Yet the history of Europe and America since the middle of the 18th century does suggest a growing sensitiveness to the infliction of unnecessary pain which sets ever higher standards in national conduct and national legislation. We move, it may be, at a snail's pace, and upon an irregular front; but it would be sheer blindness in the face of the facts to deny that we move.

It would be folly, of course, to deny that there has been no corresponding and proportional improvement in international relationships; there, at least, the maxims of Machiavellianism have retained no small degree of their former empire. Raison d'état has been held, even among high-minded men, to justify activities which they would, in their own interests, refuse with passion to contemplate. The sentiment of nationalism still persuades men and peoples to crimes that the detached observer cannot for a moment condone. Yet, even here, an unmixed pessimism is beyond the evidence. It is important that the diplomacy of the Bismarckian epoch should have issued in the great war. For there was demonstrated, beyond the possibility of error, the price we have to pay for acting upon the assumption that nations stand in the posture of gladiators and may hew their way to success. What war has shown is not merely the cost of violating the necessary foundations of human well-being to those who provide at least the immediate occasion thereof, but, not less clearly, that a Carthaginian peace is something less than a Pyrrhic victory. It became clear that the weapons now at the

disposal of men prepared to will war can have no other result than to make civilisation a mere legend of memory. In the result men have turned seriously for the first time to organise that hinterland between peoples where, formerly, the unbridled licence of the sovereign state held sway. Naturally enough, the work is as yet partial and fragmentary. But it is important to notice that no other effort in our own time has enlisted on its behalf a passion so widespread or so intense. Reason of state was, a decade ago, a ground for resisting international obligation; a generation hence, and it may well be a cause for insisting upon its observance.

Nothing of this can be taken to mean that we have the right to optimism. The forces which contend for mastery in the modern world are dark and vast, and they are impatient for victory. Many of them are still willing to risk all on some gambler's throw of the dice. Others are driven to rebellion by persecution that is as unintelligent in its inception as it is pernicious in its execution. We have to pin our faith to the frail bark of reason in a sea of stormy waters. We know the inevitability of change; we know, also, that no great change can be effected without touching interests which are powerful enough, if they so will, to repel its onset, and it appears, often enough, as though the choice before us is between self-sacrifice and conflict.

It is to the former that those must look who seek the means of response to Machiavelli. For conflict means the re-emergence of a world like the Italy he knew in which every man who seeks power is destined to become an Ishmael. Certainly to abandon the path of change by ordered discussion means the passage of power to men who have rarely been tried by service, and are often incapable of disinterestedness. It was a common saying of Mr Gladstone's that of all the characters he met in his varied experience of life politicians were the most mysterious. In a normal time what is worst in the lust for power is inhibited by the call of tradition and the necessity for compromise. But in an epoch of conflict the dark uncertainties call for audacious men capable of desperate expedients. It is futile in such periods to seek for moderation or for

principle. The stakes of success are too high; the price of defeat is too terrible. We have seen how every revolution gives opportunity to the adventurer to substitute his private ambition for the party's cause. And even when the party maintains its original purpose, the means it must utilise, the passions to which it must appeal, make it more than dubious whether the end it seeks to serve can be attained in the atmosphere it is driven by its position to create.

When conflict is so loosed, the nature of men in its context becomes what Machiavelli assumed it normally to be. That is why no man has a right to abandon the prospect of constitutional effort until he is forced by his opponents to change his ground. More, he has never the right so to act as to deprive them, as they feel, of the weapons of legitimate controversy. It must never be forgotten that what to statesmen is a struggle for power is always to the common people a struggle for bread. It is this which makes so important in a state the capacity for self-sacrifice, particularly among those who have been favoured by fortune in the struggle for existence. That capacity, at any rate, is the chief guarantee a state possesses of the continual enlargement of its freedom. Unquestionably, it means in its operation equality; and it has been the fashion even with liberal thinkers to represent equality as the enemy of liberty. It is a mistaken diagnosis. In the economic sphere, there is never liberty of contract until there is equality of bargaining power; in the political sphere liberty is always meaningless until the humble man possesses, through the medium of equality, assurance that the knowledge of his wants impresses itself with emphasis upon the holders of power. For inequality in a state is the nurse of exactly those characteristics-envy, hate, faction-which give the opportunity to what we call Machiavellianism. Without equality, the mind of the community cannot be alive either to the fascination of knowledge or to the power of beauty. Where it is absent, each class is occupied in an envious striving to dethrone its rivals; and in the heat and stress of antagonism the cement of the social structure is rapidly loosened. In a world of equals, there would still be the ambitious search for power, but it would be elevated

and ennobled by being harnessed to purposes of which the result would be widespread benefit.

In some such fashion as this, it seems possible to construct an answer to Machiavelli's theorems. It is worth while remarking how urgent it is that the effort to answer him should be made. We live in a period in which, as in the 16th and 18th centuries, the main occupation of thinkers is the dissection and discarding of the traditions we have inherited. Men are conscious of an intense malaise, and, along with it, there goes a volume of scientific discovery which makes the problem of social understanding of peculiarly high importance. We are escaping from a materialistic philosophy which closed the eyes of men to the possibilities of conscious co-operation. We know that the environment can be profoundly modified by ourselves. It can be modified along the most varied lines of which the gospel, as Machiavelli taught it, is peculiarly arresting and prominent. In a sense it is the easiest alternative to choose since it appeals to the most obvious prejudices of men and demands, less than any other, the duty of arduous reflexion. But it is a gospel of death. And it is the more disastrous because it is offered to us in a period of unstable equilibrium. It invites support from all who have an interest in disorder; it tends to persuade all who are weary of the struggle against injustice. It tempts the holders of power by suggesting to them that an onslaught upon their competitors may give them the assurance of enduring authority.

In fact, as Machiavelli himself saw, it offers no prospect save that of perpetuating all the evils it seeks to destroy. It offers a momentary advantage in exchange for the prospect of a certain renewal of war. It sharpens in men all that is most inimical to the forces that have exercised a civilising influence in history. It is the more important to reject it in an age of crisis because, as a rule, periods such as our own, when traditions, ideals, standards, are thrown into the melting pot, are the creative epochs of history. We seem, both in the sciences and the arts, to tremble on the verge of great discoveries. We need the passionate denial of maxims that make for conflict if we are to reap the advantages they seem to presage. HAROLD J. LASKI.

Art. 5.-SCHOOL MATHEMATICS: A PLEA.

DURING the past twenty and more years there have been many changes in the teaching of school mathematics. We have wandered far from the idealism of forty years ago, and have brought the subject down from the clouds to the earth, and made it more in contact with reality. There is no longer the same sting in the old question, said to have been asked of Euclid in his class-room at Alexandria, and certainly asked of many a teacher of mathematics during the past two thousand years: What is the good of all this stuff? There have been far-reaching changes in other school subjects also; it has been an age of change, no traditions have been sacred, and no foundations regarded as stable, and as a result every school time-table is horribly congested, and I, an old Public School master, am wondering, Does mathematics really deserve the generous allowance of time and of teaching capacity given to it? Does it justify, not its existence, but its greed?

All school instruction is suffering from the ceaseless flow of new material which is coming into it, the steady and constant increase in the number of claims successfully made upon the hours of work, music, singing, art, handicraft, gymnasium, to say nothing of the insistent demands of new-new to school work-branches of Science, biology, zoology, and of languages. Perhaps, as Euchen, in his 'Life's Basis and Life's Ideals,' suggests, in itself each single demand may be justifiable and admirable, but whether it is better than the other can only be decided from the idea which governs the whole; and if no such idea exists a gain in one department may be a loss to the whole. In face of that which has been handed down from the past and that which arises in the present, it is very difficult to come to a balanced judgment. The immediate impression tends to give the balance in favour of the present, and from this point of view all occupation with the past may appear to be a flight from the living to the dead. Perhaps this, in an age of vast material progress, has unconsciously influenced all educational ideals; in the din of the revolving wheels of our gigantic machines and their