terms, and you have Nordicism, or what the Anti-Nordics insist that it is. Kingsley could do this and go unscathed, because the world had not yet awakened to the Nordic peril, nor had the Golden Rule been hammered into brass knuckles.

To object that about the time that Westward Ho! was published, America had Fernando Wood of pious memory, and the Know Nothings, does not get one very far. Nor does it furnish a good enough parallel to the present day when the Nordic has been expelled from Abraham's bosom. Turn again to Montégut. He reproaches Kingsley temperately, almost regretfully, exhibiting the delicacy of treatment that shows the good workman he was, but he reproaches Kingsley that he should so boisterously enshrine the Elizabethan Englishman. Listen to his inner tone, not to his formal syllables, and you perceive it to be precisely of the school which attacks Nordicism in this year of grace. grace. With a little comparing and paraphrasing, we see in Montégut's objections and the attitude of the Anti-Nordic in the United States, the conflict between the two ideals of political organization that Sidgwick describes in his Elements, the conflict between the cosmopolitan ideal and the national ideal. The first does not contemplate any particular portion of the human race as inhabitants of any particular State, while the second does. This ideal does not fall back on any à priori King Brute, but on what it is convinced is empiric fact. Kingsley was talking to a public with “a certain vaguely defined complex of particular characteristics which we call 'the national character""; the devoted Nordic in America is talking as though such a complex ought at least to exist. The Cosmopolitan and his little brother rather excitedly deny this deduction, giving their audience the impression that they regard themselves as affronted.

This feature, in a controversy that only the slow mill-work of the gods can decide, is usually ignored, although the respective protagonists are fully conscious of it. The Nordic, the more sophisticated descendant of Charles Kingsley's school of political thought, has a lingo greatly developed beyond that of Mid-Victorian days. He is but too well acquainted with the log rolling methods of thinking produced by nominal equalitarianism, and more or less bullied by the mesmerism of majorities and that pre

tentious fraud, "the collective mind". In the United States he is sincerely desirous not to hurt any one's feelings; he does not tell his opponents: "You dislike us, not so much on account of our formal principles, as because you know you are not as good as we are." The Anti-Nordic does not say, "We know what you say is true and we dislike you for it," for such excruciating testimonies went out of fashion with the coming of the ballot box. On both sides there is fear of saying what one thinks and it must be done away with before the matter is settled. Perhaps a little moral courage will do the trick; but then, that is only speculation.

Kingsley wrote at a time when full blooded Britons were not worrying much about their own or other peoples' feelings. There was John Stuart Mill, but he was more or less alone in a certain sensitiveness of prophecy. It was actually a time when the English speaking world, though it had emerged from the Hogarthian mood of the Eighteenth Century, still believed that what was true should be stated without deference to those who might not like it. That period has been called utilitarian among other things, and it had its Manchester School; the present may be called that of Expediency. Kingsley was having a thoroughly good time in his own way with his own crowd, for all that the worthy Pusey disapproved him as a dangerous fellow. A man may still enjoy himself in this way here and there in Great Britain, but in the United States it is a fearsome zest. Nowadays in America we do not have to consider the feelings of the Nordic, but we are expected to tread very softly on the moral toes of the AntiNordics; having once adapted the movie technique to social and political thought, we must continue, detesting analysis with the fervor of those who adopt an unliterate system. With Kingsley, it was just the other way about, and this is what makes Westward Ho! a museum piece.

As the thesis of Kingsley's book reminds one of today's devoted band of Nordics and their cause, so Montégut's criticism anticipated that of 1928. He admired the book, liked its pictures, even conceded some psychology to its delineation of character, but sheered off at its prejudice. For the life of him he could not believe that the England of Amyas Leigh was peopled exclusively by brave men and good women: "England was not absolutely

peopled with religious men, modest women, brave and elegant gentlemen and learned men without pedantry." He was quite right; it wasn't, but the thing to be observed is that Kingsley had some foundations for his flamboyance. He had plenty of Elizabethan dramatists and Victorian history writers that he might have digested before he committed himself to a partiality that was bound to rasp Latin susceptibility. That is plain enough; but discounting this primæval delight with one's own tribe, and unless we admit that most English written history is worthless, we shall have to confess that Kingsley had colorable ground for his enthusiasm.

Here again one thinks of comparing the mood of 1855 with that of 1928. The Anti-Nordics are so busy demolishing the NordicAmerican claims, really those of the transplanted English speaking people in the America of a hundred years ago, that one is bound to speculate how the foundations of these United States could ever have been laid by such an inferior lot. Still struggling with this bewilderment, one may turn to the present and be further puzzled by the eccentric and exotic virtues of the NonNordic, if not indeed a good deal disappointed in them; yet the institutions of which they are such loud enjoyers and defenders are not of their making. Looking at the present conditions, one is distinctly conscious of a difference in ethical carriage and outlook; I do not mean in the sense of moral pocket handkerchiefs, but in the sense that so called Anglo-Saxon notions are discouraged. It is idle to say that these notions are the same as the Latin or Near Eastern, for they are not, whatever the exigencies of diplomatic politeness; and what has proved best for the State according to these Anglo-Saxon notions, is at least more and more denied its origin. This is carried so far in a literature more noticeable than it was a few years ago, that the Anti-Nordics will soon produce or have already produced the same phenomenon that always waits round the corner for such counter-movements. They are demonstrating that the spirit of the Nordic is no more narrow minded than their own, no more exclusive and no more unfair.

Montégut, a very fair minded critic, comes near falling into this same error. He gently rails at Kingsley's Mid-Victorian

unctuousness, and with reason enough, yet quite overlooks the Latin indulgence in just the same kind of smooth self gratulation. Really, the sentiments aroused in the Anglo-Saxon bosom by such parades as Virginie's firm refusal to take off her shift when the ship was wrecked-"cette digne demoiselle qui n'a jamais voulu se déshabiller"—these sentiments are quite as justified as Montégut's when Kingsley tells the world all about the perfectness of the Elizabethan English. It is too beautiful, too ineffably complacent, his picture, to fail of an effect. So is the Latin, which makes one speculate whether the Mediterranean and the Alpine have not some robust little prejudices of their own, and are not quite as one sided as they portray the unrepentant Nordic, the poor red faced wretch and often blonde, too.

In 1855, and its Antediluvian society, a Nordic could stick his racial chest out and take no harm; splash as a water baby and not be reprehended nor called names for being as the Lord made him. He dates, now; he is out of fashion; he is old stuff, our excellent Kingsley, and he has a glowing verbosity. Perhaps in a century or two, a paraphrase of his views will not be dangerous and the Nordic will be tolerated, but with qualifications, like the polar bear. Kingsley was not enlightened, as we are now, but he might seem to have been much freer. He is old fashioned, just as the foxes with tails are old fashioned beside those that have laid theirs on the altar of progress. As things are now in the United States, were a novelist temerarious enough to write a whole romance booming the Nordic, his end would be terrible and he could be read with safety only in lonely hill towns where the wind sweeps over the hard roads and the family daguerreotypes cower on the wallpaper.

It may annoy the Fundamentalists of either camp to say it, but these currents of mass sentiment go pretty much in cycles; De Maistre was quite sure that Locke was dead and buried, though the great rationalist never disturbed him in the way Voltaire did. Then we have Kingsley and his Westward Ho! an honest man, a gallant writer, but somewhat dominated by what George Tyrrell called an "impatient appetite for the comfort and self complacency of a certitude" in his attitude toward those who do not agree with him. Those were the days when Cobden was

sure that a rich man could squeeze through the eye of a free trade needle, and but a few years before the courts had settled that employers in dealing with employees who had been careless enough to get themselves damaged should not be held slavishly to the Golden Rule. De Maistre and Charles Kingsley alike would have disapproved very much of Mr. Harold J. Laski. I tremble to think what Kingsley would have thought of Mr. Laski's opinion that "it is our business to set the law to the rhythm of modern life". Another swing of the pendulum, though it is generally pushed, another movement of it, and we have Signor Mussolini and his moral-political system of Machiavelli-cum-Cellini and mediævalism galvanized into action. He would outdo all the gentlemen who have been projected upon the screen; he would silence De Maistre as a man of scruples and throw Kingsley and Laski to the lions, at any rate as soon as the Imperial Circus Maximus has had new plumbing and upholstery.

There is no meaning in the word "modern" for the man who is sure that he is eternally right-why should there be? The De Maistres and Kingsleys were on both sides perfectly sure they were right in their respective schemes, but neither had run up against the Nordic question, for in those days men took very nationalist views. The Precisian may object that the AntiNordic stand of such men as Mussolini is exclusive and plainly hostile to the Nordic, but then the Precisian is always making trouble about little things. The great object of our marvelling must be Kingsley's setting in the age of cocksureness and the fact that fearlessly he could write as he did. It is, as another dominie, but of the Scotch persuasion, would have said, "Prodigious".