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Berry's party held for so long, and the violence of the measures which poor Mr. Berry took in hand. It was the Age which originated the idea of the Plebiscite, and of the progressive land-tax. It is protectionist to the backbone, having commenced the cry of 'Victoria for the Victorians, and fosters a policy of isolation from the sister colonies. Prominent amongst its leader-writers is Mr.

Thus in the crisis of the Nation's fate we are ungoverned and unled, and to all appearance we are content to be so, and the leader-writers trained in the tradition of respectable formalism interpret the Nation's apathy as fortitude. Lord Salisbury's confession of impotence was true. From the beginning to the end of this business the Government has lacked the manliness to do its plain duty.

And at the conclusion of the Great Skirmish the reaction was such that for a long moment even the leader-writers wavered in their selfless doctrines; nor could continuity be secured till the Laborious Party came solidly to the saddle in 1930. Since then the principle has been firm but the practice has been firmer, and public morality has never been altogether superlative.

When I say that he was the greatest of leader-writers I am not forgetting that at this moment we have in Mr. Ian Colvin of The Morning Post a superb artist in the three-paragraph style of matutinal exhortation. Bagehot, again, was a great leader-writer; so were Robert Low and Sir Henry Mayne; and so also was Hutton.

It was said of a daily newspaper in the 'sixties that its proprietor's instructions to his leader-writers were framed in these words: "What we want from you is common sense conveyed in turgid language."

How it would have astonished those gifted leader-writers if they could have walked past, overheard me, and recognised in my halting, drowsy declamation their own well-rounded periods! As I read the last word my spirits always rose instantly, and my craving for sleep left me.

Of course there are many so-called 'ARTISTS' who are mere shams of the real thing; persons who, having a little surface-education in one or the other branch of the arts, play idly with the paint-brush, or dabble carelessly in the deep waters of literature, or borrow a few crotchets and quavers from other composers, and putting them together in haste, call it ORIGINAL COMPOSITION. Among these are to be found the self-called 'professors' of painting; the sculptors who allow the work of their 'ghosts' to be admired as their own; the magazine-scribblers; the 'smart' young leader-writers and critics; the half-hearted performers on piano or violin who object to any innovation, and prefer to grind on in the unemotional, coldly correct manner which they are pleased to term the 'classical' such persons exist, and will exist, so long as good and evil are leading forces of life.

That is an imaginary soliloquy which, I am sure, represents the feelings of plenty of leader-writers when confronted with a personal issue. Again, men who write anonymously, and in the name of their paper and not of themselves, are much less likely to yield to the foolish vanity of self-assertion.

But the student of his peculiar nature must be an odd analyst who does not in the end conclude that Grey was on the whole more akin to the Christian hero painted by Froude and Olive Schreiner than to the malevolent political chess-player of innumerable colonial leader-writers. Grey had the knightly virtues courage, courtesy, and self-command.

But I say, following the great leader-writers, that in a time of national danger nobody ought to say anything except what is in accord with the opinions of the majority; for only in this way can we present a front which will seem to be united to our common enemies.