a portion of the population, very important to the community
and growing in power, which is not facile in the art of
self-expression. That portion of the population was in evidence at the
time of the great Coal Strike, when it seemed actually on the verge of
rebellion, when it actually committed violence to the horror and
surprise of our peaceful middle classes. The fact is that the very
poor are never so far from the violent life as are members of other
classes. Violent deaths are not infrequent in factories, in
coal-mines, in great building-works, in dockyards. The life of
deprivation makes the passion of anger frequent; among the poor blows
are often exchanged, and the police are seldom called upon to
interfere. Necessarily, from the nature of the case, the poor are more
familiar with violence than are their richer and more conventional
neighbours; it is a natural thing for the more ignorant of them to
fall back upon physical force, as they did at Liverpool. And so, too,
just as they are more accustomed to petty war, they are less
interested in war between nations. In Italy it was the working-men
who protested against the war with Turkey.

But it seems that the more educated and the more organised we become,
the more we leave our affairs to be managed by professionals. When a
nation declares for war, it declares for a war to be waged by its
professionals, and it turns them on to do a job which, according to
civilised practices, is a dirty job. And when it is fired with
patriotic pride for achievements won in the field it is exercising its
emotions on something it cannot understand or realise, for the simple
reason that the violence of war is strange, distantly horrible,
fascinating, but unfamiliar. It has never directly entered into our
experience.

V

SPECIALISM IN LITERATURE

Some time ago Mr. Brander Matthews made the original suggestion in the
_North American Review_ that books should be written for the benefit
of the reader. The suggestion is not on the face of it paradoxical,
but it will be rank heresy to those who blame the public for not
bowing down before the sacrosanctity of the "serious" author. He
admits that "a book ought to be rich with the full flavour of the
author's personality;" primarily it ought to express him; but
secondarily--and this is Mr. Brander Matthews' point--"it is for the
sole benefit of the reader."

I think we may go a little further than Mr. Matthews, and find a
seco