it is the weapon of a conviction. It is like any
other form of art which is practised, not from any burning and
generous motive, but for mere love of that sense of power which gain
and popularity give. Dickens, owing to a curious gap in his knowledge,
made his typical Trade-Union leader, Slackbridge, in _Hard Times_, a
demagogue of the ranting type, who began a speech:

Oh, my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown! Oh,
my friends and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an
iron-handed and a grinding despotism! Oh, my friends and
fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen and fellow-men!

Slackbridge, we are also told, was "an ill-made, high-shouldered man
with lowering brows, and his features crushed into an habitually sour
expression." That represents the attitude of many people to popular
leaders. They believe that no one can advocate a reasonable future for
the poor without being venomous and of an ugly appearance. They do not
realise that the demagogues and agitators of to-day are chiefly men of
the propertied classes and their allies, like Sir Edward Carson and
Mr F.E. Smith. Sir Edward Carson's speeches in Ulster, indeed, are the
most extreme instances of demagogy we have had in recent years. They
are all noise and passion, roaring echoes of the mob-soul, rhetoric
and not reason, thunder-storms instead of light. They are appeals to
the war-spirit--the same spirit that Cleon and all the demagogues have
sought to awaken. Incidentally I admit that a class-war or a sex-war
may as readily produce its Carsons as a war of sectarianism. Sir
Edward Carson is the awful example to all creeds and classes of how
not to do it.

XIII

ON COINCIDENCES

An amazing story of coincidences appears in the _Westminster Gazette_.
During the Boer War four men met by chance for the first time on the
eve of some big action, and the meeting was so agreeable that one of
the men who had a bad two-shilling piece in his pocket divided it, and
gave each of the others a quarter as a memento of the evening.
Immediately afterwards they separated, and never saw or heard of each
other again till a few evenings ago, when a dinner was given in honour
of somebody or other in Birmingham. The four men were friends of the
guest of the evening, and all of them turned up at the dinner, where
they recognised each other easily, we are told, because each of them
was wearing his quarter-florin on his watch-chain.

Life is, of