the glorious thing it is, you will
respond to many single-minded, wholesome thoughts in the impassioned
statement of his thesis. And if you happen to belong to that simple
discredited breed, the English, so long overshadowed by the nimbler
Britons, you may have quite a nice little private thrill of your own,
a thrill of pride in your precious stone, and begin to think with
seriousness of the advantages of "home rule all round" in an
England-for-the-English mood, and of the value of a nationalism that is
as irrational as conjugal or mother love--and as fine.

The author's hero is an Englishman of the wandering type, assistant
editor on a crank paper. The play is a protracted debate in four
sessions, June, 1914; July, 1914; August, 1914; September, 1916. And
here the author makes his most serious mistake, the mistake made by Mr.
HENRY ARTHUR JONES in his recent squib. If he had contrived his Little
Navy folk, the proprietor, editor and revolving cranks as something
more than mere caricatures, brands of straw prepared for his consuming
bonfires, he would have strengthened, not weakened, his excellent case.
He has quoted his enemies' mistakes without their excuses, their texts
without their contexts. And that is a form of propaganda which can only
touch the converted, or such of them as are not stirred by a sporting
instinct to a certain mood of protest and a wish that the other fellow
should be given a better start in the heresy hunt.

The _dramatis personae_, then, divide themselves into the men of straw
and the right sort. Of the former you have first _Sir Andrew Craig_,
chairman of the party in his constituency and editor of _The New
Standard_ (there were indeed altogether new standards of efficiency,
mentality and hospitality in that rather imaginative newspaper office of
the First Act). Mr. FISHER WHITE gave us the courtly-obstinate old man
to the life (this player has a way of removing straw). In the dramatic
passage in which, returning after being broken in a German prison, he
relates some of the horrors of which it is good for us to be reminded,
he rose to the height of his fine talent. His exquisite elocution--a
remarkable feat of virtuosity--was in itself a sheer delight.

_Mr. Stutchbury_, the editor, pacifist and sentimental democrat, was
dealt to Mr. LENNOX PAWLE. He played his hand well. There was never such
an editor outside Bedlam; but Mr. PAWLE is a resourceful person and by a
score of clever tricks of