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SIR CHARLES DILKE

withering contempt than he for the spurious and the charlatan. “Ce fut une energie, un cerveau, un cœur, une force,” was Jules Claretie’s tribute; and those who ever met Sir Charles Dilke will endorse the Frenchman’s words. The greatest lesson he taught to some of us who had the good furtune to know him—even, like the present writer, only for a brief season in his last years—was to acquire the European mind. Himself first and foremost a good European, “he conceived of Europe as a body politic, bound in honour to regulate its own members. Isolation appeared to him a mere abandonment of the duty of the civilised Powers to maintain order in the civilised world. Corporate action was to be encouraged, because, in most cases the mere threat of it would suffice either as between States to prevent wars of aggression, or as between ruler and ruler to assert the ordinary principles of just government.”

The picture which Dilke’s biographers have painted is that of a man whose place no living parliamentarian can fill. “Amongst the men of his time he stood out as essentially a House of Commons man, but he was also a European personality. . . . Beaconsfield and Bismarck singled him out by their special interest; Gladstone looked to him as probably his own ultimate successor.” The House of Commons to-day needs just such a man as he; and if his biographers can truly say that by his death he was “fortunate at least in this that he did not live to see the breaking up of the foundations of the great deep,” we can but add that his good fortune is our great loss.

A. F. Whyte.

 

Forerunners of the Russian Revolution

[For over half a century past new and mysterious forces have been simmering in Russia, and the Slav has been preparing his contribution to the theory of social upheaval. Yet while the literary genius of a Tolstoi and a Dostoievski has won the admiration and attention, if not the comprehension, of the West, the forerunners of that New Russia which is rising before our puzzled eyes have passed neglected and unknown, or have been dismissed as dangerous and subversive. The names of Černiševski, Pisarev, Lavrov, Mihailovski, are a sealed book to us; even Herzen and Bakunin are at best mere names. Nihilists and Anarchists are known from the pages of “shilling shockers,” but their motives and reasoned philosophy have never been made accessible to us. The word “Bolševik” has acquired a sinister meaning to our public during the last few months,

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