The Next Crusade : a Cautionary Political Story. (Hutchinson and
Co. ls. net.)—This witty and suggestive little book should be in the hands of every serious politician. The author has evidently suffered in a recent crusade, and he takes his mild revenge in analysing the elements that go to form a crusade. The brewers and the landlords have been raided. Surely it is the turn of the lawyers next. We are all conscious of being a lawyer- ridden people. We cannot marry or acquire a home or make a will without their help. The lawyer, moreover, enjoys a monopoly,
word of power to the agitator, and his bills are a nuisance. There is material here for a conflagration. So thought the Rev. Evan Evans and his son Griffith. The last crusade was over, salaries bad ceased, the Rev. Evan had received a Gladstone-bag and a silver-mounted walking-stick as a testimonial from his fellow-crusaders ; but, as the pair plaintively remark, you cannot live on such things. Another movement must be started. A lawyer-hunt is clearly an inspiration. The anonymous anther has evidently studied the psychology of the political crowd. The verisimilitude of the whole piece is most striking. There is hardly a sentiment uttered by the various characters which might not with propriety be put in the mouth of our leading politician 9. At the risk of appearing hypercritical, we venture to think that he is not quite true to life in depicting the originator of the movement as a despicable and knavish character. In real life such persons, if vain, are also extremely virtuous ; indeed, an organiser of a recent movement has written a book to tell us that he was led to under- take his task by a divine interposition, in answer to prayer, and by a miraculous vision. The knaves, in our observation, come in later. First, then, there is the undoubted grievance. The relations of men involve complicated legal considerations, and an expert service has arisen to meet the difficulty. It is a costly but largely inevitable accident in civilised life. Some excitable and sentimental people (with, our author suggests, a knave or two thrown in) meet and agitate and declare that something must be done. The cry grows. Persons otherwise eminent feel called on to advise,—sentimental Bishops, political parsons, every one, in fact, who feels himself to be a leader of men. The agitation is taken up guardedly by one political party. The other party is bound to play a higher trump. Neither of them is quite in earnest, but there is no going back. The crusade has grown too strong. Mild discredited leaders who have no fixed principles of political philosophy to give stability to their opposition are carried along, and the thing is done. Then money is wanted to pay for it, and "swingeing taxation" sets in. A proposal is made to take money from the foreigner by taxing imports which, like Sir Boyle Roche's bird, shall also be excluded, to the encouragement of British industry. The country, our author would have us believe, is silly, but it is not so silly as this ; and so we are left to face the alternative, a Government pledged to a succession of Afghan raids against its political opponents. An nescis, quanti/k1 sapientid regitier mundus
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