farmer. Politicians may dispute in England as to the reform of our land system, which is handicapped by inherited traditions, but it is one of the advantages of founding a new community that the goddess of truth can be worshipped there in all her primitive indecency. The only sound rule for creative settlement in a new country is ownership.

2. Ownership being granted, the company must get a fair price for its land. This was the financial basis of the Wakefield scheme, and its soundness can hardly be challenged (although the details in Wakefield's various enterprises were frequently badly arranged).

3. The fair price being granted, it remains the fact that few of the settlers will be able, and not all of the few that are able will desire, to purchase their land outright. A system of tenant-purchase, to be completed in not more than twentyone years, is an obvious solution.

On these broad principles a fair agreement could be arrived at between proprietary company and prospective proprietors. Time would, it is true, bring various changes in the government of the company. The settlement being founded, the Board of Selection in London would practically have no further reason for existence, and would resolve itself gradually into a Court of Directors of the company's home and financial affairs, charging itself also with the duty of selling that portion of the colony's produce which was placed on the European market.

The Board of Settlement, on the other hand, would necessarily tend to resolve itself into a local government, and to this end provision should be made in the original articles of association for a gradually increasing infusion of the settlers' representatives on the Board. For the lack of this many a promising scheme has come to grief; a proprietary company is naturally jealous of its settlers' demand for a share of the government, the settlers are naturally jealous of the proprietors' power, and friction that has led at times to disastrous consequences has been the result. It is improbable that this can be altogether avoided, but it can at least be minimised by a little political forethought.

A succession of reasonably good harvests, and a fair average price for the crops, should not only assure a living for the settlers, but ensure that they would be able to pay off the

price of their land year by year. (There would, of course, have to be regulations protecting the settler who had paid part of the purchase-price over a series of years against the company should he on one occasion be late with his rent; equally the company would need to safeguard itself against unsatisfactory occupiers-a few are bound to slip through the most careful Board of Selection-not merely to protect itself against loss, but to protect the community against the evil example of the idler or the absentee.) Given reasonable terms, there should be no difficulty in every settler owning his own freehold before the end of the twenty-one years which may be given as a rough estimate of the life of the company.

These postulates being granted, good settlers being selected, and reasonable wisdom being shown by the heads of the enterprise, there is no reason whatever why the company should not be a financial success, in the sense that it would obtain the return of its money and something over from the sale of its land, and the transport of men and produce over its railways. In the end it would have what is even more important the knowledge that, by carrying out some part at least of the work of systematic colonisation for which this paper pleads, it had done something towards reducing the difficulties with which the mother country will be faced after the present

war.

A. WYATT TILBY.

THE DANGER FOR HOLLAND

OME political prophecies are merely gratuitous errors; others resemble the working out of problems in kinetics. If the forces in operation are known and can be approximately measured, their approximate result, unless other forces are set in motion to counteract them, can be deduced. The prediction that the situation created by the present war will be found to entail a special danger for Holland is really an inference of that kind; and the danger is such that the defeat of Germany, while altering the character of the danger, will not remove it.

If the Dutch do not know how a triumphant Germany would treat them, it certainly is not for want of a fair warning. The programme was elaborated long ago, and has been advertised, at frequent intervals, by professors, publicists, and politicians. Just as Napoleon once claimed Holland on the ground that the soil was composed of mud deposited by French rivers, so the Germans have latterly claimed it on the ground that it consists of the sediment of German rivers; and they also claim it on the grounds that the Dutch are their cousins, and that they want it, and would know what to do with it. In the German manuals of geography used in schools, Holland is included in ' Germany in the proper sense of the word'; and the annexation or absorption of Holland has been recommended, not merely by sensational journalists, but by responsible writers who may be presumed to weigh their words. This is what Clausewitz, for instance, said on the subject:

'Let us not forget the civilising task imposed upon us by the decrees of Providence. Just as Prussia was inevitably the kernel of Germany, so a regenerated Germany will be the kernel of the future Western Empire. In order, therefore, that there may be no mistake about it, we proclaim here and now that our continental nation is entitled to have access to the sea,-not only to the North Sea, but also to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Consequently we shall absorb, one after the other, all the territories adjoining Prussia, and shall annex successively, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, &c., &c.'

The works of Clausewitz are, as it were, the Holy Scriptures

of the Prussian Militarists. The founder of the modern school of German political philosophy is Treitschke; and Treitschke, in this matter, says ditto to Clausewitz :

'The Rhine is the king of rivers. It is an infinitely precious natural resource to Germany, and, through our own fault, the very part of the Rhine which is materially most valuable to us has fallen into the hands of foreigners. It is an indispensable duty of German policy to regain the mouths of that river. A purely political connexion with Holland is perhaps not necessary; but an economic union of Holland and Germany is absolutely required; and we are far too modest if we are afraid to say that Holland's entrance into the German Customs Union is as necessary to us as our daily bread.'

Similar, and perhaps even more significant, is an utterance of the Grenzboten '-an organ through which it has sometimes been the custom of Imperial Chancellors to say things which it did not suit them to say in the Reichstag. In an issue published at the time of the opening of the Dortmund-Ems canal, it is pointed out that this new canal might easily be used, by means of a system of subsidies, to ruin, by its competition, the entrepôt trade of Rotterdam. It was further hinted that the canal probably would be so used unless Holland consented to join the Zollverein. The article went on to discuss the political relations of the two countries, and to exploit the hostility to England which the Boer War, then just concluded, had temporarily provoked in the Netherlands:

'Politically, Holland is threatened by other nations. Her guaranteed neutrality is no more than a scrap of paper which would prove worthless in war. Spain has been brutally crushed by the United States; Portugal hangs like a fly in the spider's net of England, a prey to her monopolistic mercantile system. The Dutch will not share the fate of the Boers, but, if they are not careful, they may be caught in British snares. From all these dangers incorporation with Germany is the only salvation. The movement of naval expansion in Germany will not end until a German Navy floats on the sea that can compete with the fleet of Great Britain. Equally strong on sea and on land, the world may choose our friendship or our enmity. The strong may make their choice; but Holland will do well to stand by us in friendship, not so much for our sake as for her own existence.'

For years, and even for generations, the German press had, in this way, alternately cajoled and threatened the Dutch, offering them, as it were, sometimes unofficially, and sometimes

semi-officially, the alternative of voluntary or compulsory incorporation in the German Empire. The Dutch, who live in much more intimate contact with German life and thought than we do, had read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested both the blandishments and the menaces. They probably understood that, whereas a German statesman or emperor who makes a promise or gives a guarantee can never be trusted to keep it, a German who utters a threat is generally a man of his word; and they certainly behaved at the beginning of this war-I speak of the behaviour of the people as well as of the Government-as if that were their considered estimate of the character of their neighbours.

It is not merely that, like the Belgians and the Swiss, they made haste to mobilise and guard their frontiers-that might have been only a matter of form or routine. But the country was also swept by a wave of panic, as fierce, and sudden, and far-reaching as the recent inundation of the polders. The military precautions taken clearly indicated a real apprehension that the guns would begin to shoot, and that even cities as remote as Amsterdam from the route of an army invading France would have to defend themselves. The preparations at Naarden-the Amsterdam fortress-included not only the construction of extensive wire entanglements, but the felling of avenues of trees and the demolition of a number of cottages and villa residences which obstructed the line of fire; and there was even talk of razing the beautiful wood of Bussum to the ground. As for the citizens, who were mostly spending their summer holidays in the country or at the seaside, they jumped into the first conveyances they could find, and scurried back to the towns, like rabbits bolting for their burrows.

Nor was the panic ended when they reached their homes; on the contrary, it assumed fresh shapes, and took a new lease of life. People drew their money out of the banks, hoarded gold, and refused to give change for notes; and then, with one accord, they proceeded to stock their larders with provisions, as if for a siege. Immense mobs were massed outside the doors of the various establishments of the great Eigen Hulp Cooperative Stores, which would have been emptied in the course of a few hours if the order had not been given that no single purchaser should be supplied with more than a small allowance of any one commodity. The minor shops, all over the