confronts them is not really tolerant, because it is insensitive, and not really humorous, because it is bounded by the titter and the guffaw.

Turn over the pages of Punch. There is neither wit, laughter, nor satire in our national jester - only the snigger of a suburban householder who can understand nothing that does not resemble himself. Week after week, under Mr. Punch's supervision, a man falls off his horse, or a colonel misses a golf ball, or a little girl makes a mistake in her prayers. Week after week ladies show not too much of their legs, foreigners are deprecated, originality condemned. Week after week a bricklayer does not do as much work as he ought and a futurist does more than he need. It is all supposed to be so good-tempered and clean; it is also supposed to be funny. It is actually an outstanding example of our attitude toward criticism: the middle-class Englishman, with a smile on his clean-shaven lips, is engaged in admiring himself and ignoring the rest of mankind. If, in those colorless pages, he came across anything that really was funny - a drawing by Max Beerbohm, for instance his smile would disappear, and he would say to himself, 'The fellow's a bit of a crank,' and pass on.

This particular attitude reveals such insensitiveness as to suggest a more serious charge: is the Englishman altogether indifferent to the things of the spirit? Let us glance for a moment at his religion - not, indeed, at his theology, which would not merit inspection, but at the action on his daily life of his belief in the unseen. Here again his attitude is practical. But an innate decency comes out: he is thinking of others rather than of himself. Right conduct is his aim. He asks of his religion that it shall make him a better man in daily life; that he shall be more kind, more just, more merciful, more

desirous to fight what is evil and to protect what is good. No one could call this a low conception. It is, as far as it goes, a spiritual one. Yet - and this seems to me typical of the race - it is only half the religious idea. Religion is more than an ethical code with a divine sanction. It is also a means through which man may get into direct connection with the divine, and, judging by history, few Englishmen have succeeded in doing this. We have produced no series of prophets, as has Judaism or Islam. We have not even produced a Joan of Arc, or a Savonarola. We have produced few saints. In Germany the Reformation was due to the passionate conviction of Luther. In England it was due to a palace intrigue. We can show a steady level of piety, a fixed determination to live decently according to our lights - little more.

Well, it is something. It clears us of the charge of being an unspiritual nation. That facile contrast between the spiritual East and the materialistic West can be pushed too far. The West also is spiritual. Only it expresses its belief, not in fasting and visions, not in prophetic rapture, but in the daily round, the common task. An incomplete expression, if you like. I agree. But the argument underlying these scattered notes is that the Englishman is an incomplete person. Not a cold or an unspiritual one. But undeveloped, incomplete.

The attitude of the average orthodox Englishman is often misunderstood. It is thought that he must know that a doctrine—say, like that of the Trinity

enough in daily life,' he will say. 'I concern myself with those. As for the Trinity, it is a doctrine handed down to me from my fathers, whom I respect, and I hope to hand it down to my sons, and that they will respect me. No doubt it is true, or it would not have been handed down. And no doubt the clergy could explain it to me if I asked them; but, like myself, they are busy men, and I will not take up their time.'

In such an answer there is confusion of thought, if you like, but no conscious deceit, which is alien to the English nature. The Englishman's deceit is generally unconscious.

For I have suggested earlier that the English are sometimes hypocrites, and it is now my duty to develop this rather painful subject. Hypocrisy is the prime charge that is always brought against us. The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on; but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is; but while making it we must be quite clear as to what we mean by hypocrisy. Do we mean conscious deceit? Well, the English are comparatively guiltless of this; they have little of the Renaissance villain about them. Do we mean unconscious deceit? Muddle-headedness? Of this I believe them to be guilty. When an Englishman has been led into a course of wrong action, he has nearly always begun by muddling himself. A public-school education does not make for mental clearness, and he possesses to a very high degree the power of confusing his own mind. We have seen this tendency at work in the domain of theology; how does it work in the domain of conduct?

Jane Austen may seem an odd authority to cite, but Jane Austen has, within her limits, a marvelous insight into the English mind. Her range is limited, her characters never attempt any of the more scarlet sins. But she has a merciless eye for questions of conduct, and the classical example of two English people muddling themselves before they embark upon a wrong course of action is to be found in the opening chapters of Sense and Sensibility. Old Mr. Dashwood has just died. He has been twice married. By his first marriage he has a son, John; by his second marriage three daughters. The son is well off; the young ladies and their mother their mother for Mr. Dashwood's second wife survives him are badly off. He has called his son to his deathbed and has solemnly adjured him to provide for the second family. Much moved, the young man promises, and mentally decides to give each of his sisters a thousand pounds; and then the comedy begins. For he announces his generous intention to his wife, and Mrs. John Dashwood by no means approves of depriving their own little boy of so large a sum. The thousand pounds are accordingly reduced to five hundred. But even this seems rather much. Might not an annuity to the stepmother be less of a wrench? Yes - but though less of a wrench it might be more of a drain, for 'she is very stout and healthy, and scarcely forty.' An occasional present of fifty pounds will be better, 'and will, I think, be amply discharging my promise to my father.' Or, better still, an occasional present of fish. And in the end nothing is done, nothing; the four impecunious ladies are not even helped in the moving of their furniture.

Well, are the John Dashwoods hypocrites? It depends upon our definition of hypocrisy. The young man could not see his evil impulses as they

gathered force and gained on him. And even his wife, though a worse character, is also self-deceived. She reflects that old Mr. Dashwood may have been out of his mind at his death. She thinks of her own little boy — and surely a mother ought to think of her own child. She has muddled herself so completely that in one sentence she can refuse the ladies the income that would enable them to keep a carriage and in the next can say that they will not be keeping a carriage and so will have no expenses. No doubt men and women in other lands can muddle themselves, too, yet the state of mind of Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood seems to me typical of England. They are slow they take time even to do wrong; whereas people in other lands do wrong quickly.

There are national faults as there are national diseases, and perhaps one can draw a parallel between them. It has always impressed me that the national diseases of England should be cancer and consumption - slow, insidious, pretending to be something else; while the diseases proper to the South should be cholera and plague, which strike at a man when he is perfectly well and may leave him a corpse by evening. Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood are moral consumptives. They collapse gradually without realizing what the disease is. There is nothing dramatic or violent about their sin. You cannot call them villains.

Here is the place to glance at some of the other charges that have been brought against the English as a nation. They have, for instance, been accused of treachery, cruelty, and fanaticism. In these charges I have never been able to see the least point, because treachery and cruelty are conscious sins. The man knows he is doing wrong, and does it deliberately — like Tartuffe or Iago. He betrays his friend because he

wishes to. He tortures his prisoners because he enjoys seeing the blood flow. He worships the Devil because he prefers evil to good. From villainies such as these the average Englishman is free. His character, which prevents his rising to certain heights, also prevents him from sinking to these depths. Because he does n't produce mystics he does n't produce villains either; he gives the world no prophets, but no anarchists, no fanatics - religious or political.

Of course there are cruel and treacherous people in England - one has only to look at the police courts and examples of public infamy can be found, such as the Amritsar massacre. But one does not look at the police courts or the military mind to find the soul of any nation; and the more English people one meets the more convinced one becomes that the charges as a whole are untrue. Yet foreign critics often make them. Why? Partly because they fix their eyes on the criminal classes, partly because they are annoyed with certain genuine defects in the English character, and in their irritation throw in cruelty in order to make the problem simpler. Moral indignation is always agreeable, but nearly always misplaced. It is indulged in both by the English and by the critics of the English. They all find it great fun. The drawback is that while they are amusing themselves the world becomes neither wiser nor better.

The main point of these notes is that the English character is incomplete. No national character is complete. We have to look for some qualities in one part of the world and others in another. But the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface bad surface-self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. There is plenty

Hebraic significance of all that is abundant, satisfactory, and complete? As for precedent, I can indicate, in olden times, "The Seventy,' the title of the seventytwo translators of the Septuagint; and - it seems only yesterday- who of us who have seen and heard them will forget those thousands upon thousands of long, slender stems, with upraised muzzles alert and ready, like the fangs of faithful watchdogs, stretching on and on in an unending, unbroken, unbreakable line, over hills and through valleys, like the towers of the Great Wall-les soixante-quinzes!

My intention in regard to an island of water was simultaneous with my turning from the jungle to the ocean. It exemplifies my passion for small, restricted things. In many ways an island is much more significant to me than a continent; a solitary tree than a jungle; the life history of a single family of living creatures, or of one species, or better still- of an individual, than casual studies of an entire phylum. This accounts for my biased researches in times past. I fear that the same characteristic would always rob a jail of its horror- there are reasons why I had rather be the Prisoner of Chillon than the Wandering Jew.

When I began studying the oceanographic voyages of past years, one thing stood out at once the tremendous distances covered. The ship would stop to sound, make a haul, and then, up sails or steam, and away a few hundred miles to the next station the very name 'station' being significant of railway speed. This was necessary, for pioneers in any field must be peripatetic. Much good Columbus would have done the world milling around in one spot in mid-ocean, or Balboa if he had been content to rest at the foot of his Darien peak. There is still need for hundreds of voyages of widest range

before we can know the distribution of ocean life with any accuracy.

My objects in the Arcturus adventure militated against any prolonged study of a single locality. To learn anything of the Sargasso Sea and the Humboldt Current it was necessary to cover hundreds and thousands of miles, and this I had done. But away at the back of my mind was an obstinate intention to have a try at making an island out of an enormously tall column of water resting on a limited bit of very wet land. I was conservative in my first attempt, and decided to select a place where the pillar of water was less than a mile in height. I say 'height' advisedly, for if anything is worth studying intensively, one must absolutely identify one's self with it. Some of the greatest joys of my life come when I shed the unlovely thing that I am condemned to carry about through life as transportation and periscope to my mind and soul. For the time being I must become pheasant, protozoan, sloth, or tree.

Now I was to become, not only a fish, but one on the bottom, — on the face of my island, so that I must speak of the height, not the depth, of the water overhead. It is an easy thing to do, if you love to do it; and on land the reverse is equally facile, for the depth of air over a given place becomes almost a trite term when you have flown over it a score of times.

I cheated a little about my water island, perhaps, but I was so anxious to have it a success that I was willing to load the dice a bit. By this I mean that I let myself be influenced, in choosing the spot, by the memory of an unusually splendid haul that I had made not far away a few weeks before

not a very heinous thing, to be sure, but not quite so sporting as would have been steaming blindly ahead and