moral-and, as we have seen, financial-conditions are markedly better; but it can be said now with confidence that, with the exception of France, no belligerent on either side has produced so much military talent and of so high an order. We have already spoken of General Brusiloff-who holds the extraordinary record of having captured more than 500,000 enemy troops; of General Evert; of the veteran, General Kuropatkin, whose book on the Japanese war and the defects of the Russian army without doubt contributed to the removal of many of these defects; of General Michael Alexeieff, Commander in Chief under the Emperor; and it would be unjust not to mention two very remarkable men, who, under the general supervision of Grand Duke Nicholas, are fighting Russia's battles in Asia: General Baratoff, in Persia, who is now some fifty miles from Bagdad, and General Yudenitch, the conqueror of Erzerum and Trebizond.

A word, perhaps, may be said about the Grand Duke himself, who stands out as the most brilliant military figure of the whole war. We spoke, a little while ago, of General Ruzsky, who shared the first Galician offensive with General Brusiloff. This brilliant and tenacious soldier was compelled to withdraw, because of serious illness, a short time before Mackensen's great raid. He recovered, and again returned to the front, this time on the Riga-Dwinsk line; but, unhappily, a recurrence of the malady has caused his withdrawal once again. While the details are not known, it seems certain that something of the same nature befell Grand Duke Nicholas. When convalescent he was able to take up the duties of Viceroy of the Caucasus, traditionally the most honorable post in the Russian Empire, after the Emperor, and long held by the Grand Duke Michael, the Grand Old Man of Russia's imperial house, whose prestige hardly yielded to that of the Emperor himself. In large measure restored to health, Grand Duke Nicholas has been able to conceive and supervise the remarkable Eastern campaigns, choosing General Baratoff to lead the Russian forces in Persia, and General Yudenitch to conquer Turkish Armenia. Only in this section of the war-map does war retain its old-time mobility, if we except tropical Africa, where the numbers engaged are very small; and it is one of the wonders of the Grand Duke's plan, that he has been able so perfectly to co-ordinate the movements of half-a-dozen separate forces, operating hundreds of miles apart, amid huge moun

tains and barren wildernesses, among savage and hostile tribes; this, and the complete secrecy with which the Persian venture especially was shrouded; so that, until the capture of Sultanabad and Hamadan, we had hardly any inkling that events, which will be decisive for the future history of Western Asia, were in preparation. General Baratoff and his small force-he had hardly more than a division-were sent by way of the Caspian, which is practically a Russian lake, to Teheran; where the first need was to bring the Shah definitely to the Russian side, as against the intrigues of the German Minister, Prince Henry of Reuss, who had sought to gather a Moslem force for an attack on India. It is a part of the revenge of time that Russia, whose invasion of India was a traditional nightmare of an earlier generation of Englishmen, has, in fact, saved India from invasion. General Baratoff then worked westward, across the huge mountainbarrier which separates Persia from the Tigris and Euphrates valley, and it is probable that he will very shortly join hands with General Yudenitch, the victor at Erzerum. So that the conception and co-ordination of these brilliant Asiatic operations must be added to the already notable record of Grand Duke Nicholas.

At the head of all these men and forces stands the new War Minister, General Shuvaieff, who came to the War Ministry at Petrograd almost at the same time that General Roques took office as Minister of War in Paris.

CHARLES JOHNSTON.

THE IRISH INSURRECTION

BY SYDNEY BROOKS

To bring the recent troubles in Ireland under a just focus one must go back a little distance. That, indeed, is the golden rule in all things Irish. There is hardly a problem of all the many problems that Ireland presents today, there is hardly a characteristic of her people, hardly anything can happen within her borders, which has not to be explained, which only, indeed, becomes intelligible, in the light of Anglo-Irish history. More than in any country I know of, the past in Ireland is the present and the present is the culmination of the unhappy legacy of the past. To elucidate what is, you must start with a working consciousness of what has been; and the philosophic historian would not, I imagine, have much difficulty in tracing back the origins of that convulsive week in April, 1916, to the first beginnings of AngloIrish relations.

But for my present purpose it will be enough if an attempt is made, very briefly, to review the decisive movements of Irish life and thought during the past decade and a half. For Ireland they have been years, first, of an unparalleled prosperity, secondly, of the development along many varied lines of a genuinely Irish spirit, and, thirdly, until the Home Rule question became once more acute, of an almost uniform tranquillity. It was not fanciful, still less was it fantastic, to speak of "the new Ireland " ten and even five years ago as a growing reality. The two measures that had done most to alter the social and political life of Ireland since the 'eighties were the Local Government Act and the Wyndham Land Purchase Act. The first tore from the upper classes, from the landlords and gentry, from the Ascendancy Party, their exclusive control of local administration. The second expropriated landlordism, brought within sight of a decisive and more or less harmonious finish the poisonous struggle

for the land and set Ireland on the high road to becoming a nation of peasant proprietors. For seven centuries the land question had gathered to itself the fiercest animosities. and passions of social, religious, political and economic antagonism. Its settlement in 1902 meant not only that Ireland was emerging from the more acute stage of agrarian unrest, but also that the fight for the soil was destined to lose most of its old class contentiousness and would soon cease to provide the motive power for political agitation. There was thus engendered a peace and a stability such as Ireland had never known, the landlords no longer living at war with tenants, but on terms of friendship with neighbors; and the former tenants, now the possessors of their holdings, no longer agitating for a reduction of rent or scheming to oust the owners of the soil, but turning their thoughts more and more steadily to the problems of practical agriculture.

But more remarkable even than this beneficent revolution was the manner in which it was brought about. It was brought about by landlords and tenants meeting at a roundtable conference. And this conference and its success in settling what was by far the oldest and most contentious of Irish problems were no more than a token of a new spirit of practicality and a new sense of unity, nationality and interdependence that had been steadily permeating Irish affairs since the dying down of the passions aroused by the Parnellite split. There were still, it was true, two Irelands, or twenty. North and South, Protestant and Catholic, industry and agriculture, had not yet come together as fully and freely as they should have done. The feeling that all Irishmen were members of one nation was still faint and elusive. The memories of old struggles had not yet been wholly obliterated. The spirit of caste still obtained. The essentials of a prosperous national existence were still to be completely recognized. None the less it was safe five years ago to assert that the two previous decades had witnessed the growth of more interest among Irishmen in the practical problems of life and more co-operation among them in the solution of those problems than any previous period of Irish history.

'If I had been asked, say in 1912, to summarize in general terms the chief characteristics of the "new Ireland," I should have said, first, that the Irish mind had taken a novel and most hopeful turn towards the concrete and the con

structive; secondly, that there was a greater realization than ever before that the regeneration of the country depended ultimately on the efforts of Irishmen in Ireland; thirdly, that there never was a time when more spheres of nonpolitical and non-sectarian endeavor were open to Irishmen of all classes, creeds and parties; fourthly, that social, religious and political barriers were gradually breaking down, and Irishmen were working round to some conception of what nationality really is; and, fifthly, that the Irish people were slowly emancipating themselves from the tyranny of leagues and committees, and were beginning to think, speak and act for themselves in a new and salutary spirit of individualism—in other words, were developing a stronger character.

For the proofs to justify this diagnosis I should have pointed to the agricultural co-operative movement initiated and still directed by Sir Horace Plunkett-a movement that now embraces 100,000 farmers; to the Recess Committee which was composed of Irishmen of all ranks and faiths and political affiliations-of men, that is to say, who previously had barely conceived the possibility of their having anything in common-and which formulated a remarkable programme of material betterment; to the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, a department which the people feel to be their own creation, which is popularly controlled, and which works with and through committees appointed by the County Councils; to the thoughts, care and money that had been lavished on the congested districts; to the many movements that were fostering an industrial revival; and above all, to the famous conference that settled the land question. I should have pointed also to much else to the Gaelic League with its admirable propaganda for reviving the old Irish tongue, for promoting temperance, for educating the people in the broadest spirit of nationality, for building up a self-contained, all-embracing Irish Ireland; to the Sinn Féin movement which, whatever one might have thought of its political programme, did at least war on all the divisions that had kept Irishmen apart; to the stirrings of democracy in Ulster, the rise of a Labor party in Belfast, the revolt of the Young North against a barren sectarianism and against the aloofness of Protestantism from the main stream of Irish life; to the general attrition of interest in political agitation; to the advance which many Unionists, under one