of his loyal little company, with whom he went to a number of small towns in Scotland.

As there were no theatres in these places, he travelled with his own scenery, and the rooms in which he acted were fitted up from week to week or night to night-an operation involving incessant labour, trouble, and anxiety.

It was hard that it should come to this!

There can be no doubt that the mortification and the humiliation attendant upon these squalid and ignoble experiences preyed upon his mind.

The iron had entered his soul, and in moments of despondency and despair, he was wont to say, in the bitterness of his heart, that, in the future, he saw before him the vision of a grim and grizzled man at a prompter's desk!

In other and more defiant moods, he would exclaim―

"Never! while an arch of Waterloo Bridge remains standing!"

"Quick death is easy. He who dies slowly dies a thousand times.” When death came to him, fortunately it came quickly, and found him erect and smiling.

It was at a small border town, called Hawick, that the summons

came.

On the opening night he played Othello, and although there was a wretched house, amounting to barely a few pounds, it was generally remarked that he acted with all the old grace and fervour.

After the play, when he had finished dressing, he came and sat upon the stage, waiting for the acting manager to bring him the miserable pittance which constituted his share of the receipts.

The primitive orchestra consisted of a piano, on which entractes were played behind the scenes by a member of the company.

Evidently the "chief" was in a despondent mood, for he remained silent and saturnine. Noting this, one of the young fellows of the troupe sat down to the piano, and began to play some lively airs. When he had finished, Dillon muttered:

"You have a light heart, a light heart, sir; how I envy you!" With that he sighed and turned away.

Could he have had a presentiment that the end was so near?

Next morning he went down to the theatre to inquire if there were any letters. He was now elate and confident. Although the house had been so bad on the preceding night, the impression created upon the scanty audience was so favourable that a capital week's business was anticipated.

After his usual custom-and a very bad one it was—he took the company to the adjacent tavern, and stood drinks of humble malt all round, told them some piquant story of his adventures in America and Australia, then they sallied forth together to explore the town.

As they reached the middle of the High Street, laughing and talking, he paused suddenly, put his hand to his head, just as he was wont to do in Beverley, and exclaimed, "God, can this be death?" As the words left his lips, he fell dead without a groan !

His muscles had been so trained to harmonious motion, that habit had become second nature, and one of those who stood beside him in that supreme moment, assured me, that in the very rigor mortis, he instinctively fell in an attitude of classic grace, even as Cæsar might have fallen beneath the steel of Brutus at the base of Pompey's statue.

It was best that the end came as it did, for the aspirations which had been more than fulfilled in the summer of his existence, died out in its dreary autumn, and the future was a hopeless blank.

I was in Hastings when I heard that my poor lost comrade was to be buried at Brompton the following day.

One hour after the news reached me I was on my way to town, On the morrow, with a few staunch friends who loved him living, and who mourned him dead, I followed him to his last resting-place.

Although there had been no public notice of the funeral, a prodigious crowd-amidst which were many women-assembled to do honour to his memory.

As an actor, he was unquestionably one of the first of his epoch; as a man, he had many genial and lovable qualities; as for his faults, may they lie gently on him-as gently as the flowers those pale and weeping women cast that day upon his grave.

JOHN COLEMAN.

OUR MARITIME SUPREMACY.

W

HEN the Brussels International Conference met in 1874 to formulate, if possible, some laws of war to be binding between future belligerents, the only condition on which the English Conservative Government, then in power, would consent to send a representative, was a written assurance from every other Power that the existing laws of war with regard to the sea should be kept outside the range of discussion. This implied that those laws, as they were left by the Treaty of Paris after the Crimean war, left nothing more to be desired from the English point of view, and that we had every reason to be content with the practice it omitted to touch, which subjected the commerce of a belligerent Power to the regular cruisers and war-ships of a hostile State, though no longer to commissioned privateersmen.

The retention of this practice may therefore be regarded as article number one in that system of war customs at sea wherein is supposed to lie the secret of our maritime supremacy. Yet there is probably no custom more than this very one that we are so interested, as a commercial community, in getting removed by universal consent from the code of legitimate international warfare. And for reasons that are sufficiently obvious.

It is imagined that the practice of preying upon an enemy's merchant shipping and commerce gives us an infinitely greater power to damage him than any he can have to damage us in retaliation. But this is to forget the infinitely greater surface we present to attack; the infinitely greater amount we stand to lose. Dealing with commercial statistics is something like dealing with astronomical distances, but the round numbers convey some idea of the far greater value of our shipping and oceanic trade, compared with that of other countries, and prove that, unless we can adequately protect our interests at sea in time of war we run an amount of risk as compared with that of the rest of the whole commercial world rather in the proportion of two to one than of one to two. Some 800 million pounds represent the value of our export and import

trade, as against 280 millions for that of France or 250 millions for that of the United States; which is to say, that our trade is half as much again as that of the two countries that come next to us in maritime trade. And the amount of our steam and sailing shipping is rather more than that of the whole of the rest of the world put together; a fair indication of the vast importance of our carrying trade.

Moreover, by far the greater part of the trade of any European nation with whom we are likely to be at war (say, for instance, Russia) is over land, not over sea; is territorial not maritime; so that our apparently greater powers of injury against the commerce of such an enemy is more than compensated for, not only by the far greater extent of our commerce, but by the fact of its being entirely maritime.

Let us suppose ourselves at war with any Power or Powers who either possess, or are able to purchase, a large number of fast steamcruisers to prey upon our commerce, and let us trace the effects. Our sailing fleet, which still constitutes more than one-half of our total shipping tonnage, and on which we depend for the 200,000 tons of wheat that come to us annually from California, would be rendered useless, for such sailing vessels would lie at the mercy of the enemy in a way they never did before the days of modern fast steamers; nor could any convoy easily protect a fleet of sailing vessels from a nocturnal attack from steam-cruisers. Consequently, the ships would have to be sold, and sold at a loss, or the ships would be transferred nominally to neutral, say, French owners, for the safety afforded by the neutral flag. In either case, there could not fail to be a great loss of trade.

Nor could the slower class of steamer, which now carries the greater part of our trade, fare much better than the sailing ships. Our own fast cruisers, fully employed, we may suppose, against the enemy's commerce, would not be numerous enough to supply protection to our own commerce at more than a few points-certainly not along the whole of our many trade-routes. We might possibly obviate this by a costly multiplication of fast cruisers, but unless we were so prepared at the opening of war, we should have no pleasant time before us if for six months our supplies of foreign corn and other food could be stopped, or if our cotton-mills and other trades could be brought to a stand-still for want of the raw materials on which they subsist. And to our colonies it would mean bankruptcy on a large scale, if owing to the interruption of war, they could not send their goods to market and realise immediately upon them: a

reason which might lead them to estimate afresh the value of their dependence on their mother country.

In this emergency, the best thing for our trade-carrying steamers as for our sailing vessels would be their transfer, real or fictitious, to a neutral flag, under which they would travel unimpeded. But such sale, if real, could only be effected at a depreciated value; whilst a nominal transfer to the register of a foreign country would be so far a loss that the merchantmen so transferred would be no longer available as a resource for strengthening our navy. Moreover, our carrying trade thus having passed into the hands of a neutral Powersay the United States-would tend to remain permanently with it, and would not be recoverable till the changes and chances of politics made that Power in its turn belligerent, and ourselves, who were belligerents, neutrals.

If, therefore, by the transfer to a neutral flag our exports and imports remained undiminished, going from or coming to us in ships originally English but since denaturalised, it could only be at the cost of heavy pecuniary loss to our shipowners or of heavy naval loss to the country. Nor would our enemy, by an equal necessity of resort to the neutral flag, suffer nearly so much as we should, since the greater part of his trade, being territorial and not maritime, would remain less affected by the change in question.

But here we are met, as at every point of the laws of war at sea, by the extreme desirability of a general maritime code, and by the necessity of our forming a rational appreciation of our interests by a broad view of future contingencies. The view here taken, that the further restriction of belligerent rights is to the interest of this country, provokes dispute from some quarters, but it is often forgotten that we have actually bound ourselves by our own municipal law, and by contract with the United States, to a course of conduct towards neutral Powers which they are in no way bound to reciprocate, and which places us at a clear disadvantage with regard to them. Thus, by our Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870, it is made. illegal for any Englishman, among other things, to build or cause to be built, or to equip, or despatch or cause to be despatched, any ship believed to be intended for the service of a foreign State at war with a Power with whom we are at peace. Any ship suspected of being built with such design may be seized, searched, and detained by the Secretary of State till released by a Court of Law. But unless and until the restriction is one of universal international obligation, it evidently places our shipbuilding trade at a disadvantage with that of other countries. It is a good thing that it