old watch-words, to loot and ravage and destroy. Banks were robbed. To be sure, they might at first have been robbed to supplement the funds of the "Republic"; but the example was one that swiftly spread; and banks were soon robbed, by armed and idle men, for private ends. And presently the country, to which so great an opportunity of development had been offered, was full of desperate, ofttimes fearless men, who laid the country waste and in ruins, all in the name of high ideals, some few faithfully serving those ideals, but the majority a prey to their worst, untutored instincts.

V

All this, be it remembered, was in a country where there was no veneration of law on which to rely-law and order as the fruit of experience based in a people's consent. The immediate evil was gross enough; but it was set before so ominous a background. In other countries, with a more fortunate history, the same circumstances would have led to a similar result; but there would always have been the reflex habit of law, the unconscious memory of order, to keep the evil within bounds, and finally to bring it within control. In Ireland there were no such things. It was not the people's fault that such things were not. But the truth is not changed thereby; and therefore (failing the flame-clothed heights of a new Sinai, itself, according to Scripture, of doubtful potency) the Executive Power set up under the new Constitution of the Free State had laid upon it the necessity of extreme candor, coupled at all times with insistence on and enforcement of the reign of law, even, if need were, to the point of pedantry.

Unhappily, as it seems to me, this necessity was not recognized. It has not been recognized down to this moment of writing. One form of arbitrary government has succeeded to another. Each has been based on a fatal fallacy in democratic doctrine a fallacy, indeed, which despotic doctrine itself has been careful often to avoid. This fallacy lies in the assumption that, because a legislative assembly has been elected by the popular vote, and because that assembly has created an executive dependent on its will, therefore that executive in all acts represents the popular will. No fallacy could be more vicious. Logic

chopping could go no further from actuality; and the Hegelian State could claim no greater exemption from restraint in its acts. The doctrine is in fact absurd within itself; but the conditions in Ireland make it more absurd still, because (as one may speak with some authority, having some inner knowledge of the facts) there has been no free election in Ireland since 1918, the two elections since then, in 1921 and 1922, representing attempts to force and pervert the people's freedom of voting to party advantage. Any Executive brought into being as a consequence of such elections has, indeed, imposed upon it the necessity of government; but, more even than most governments, it has imposed upon it also the necessity of revealing all the motives and causes of its action to its masters, the people, and of reacting to any clear indication of the people's will.

Instead of which, after the Treaty was accepted, the Provisional Government of the Free State, itself most strangely and arbitrarily set up, dallied with and truckled to rebellion against the clear desire of the people. It finally entered into a pact with the leaders of that rebellion to corrupt elections by forcing certain candidates on the people's acceptance. Nothing in recent times has more shocked the people than this act. After these elections, however, the Government so brought into existence proceeded to substitute a new doctrine of the divine right of Ministries for the outworn doctrine of the divine right of Kings. It kept the causes of its decisions to itself, instead of expounding them with extremest candor, so as to carry the people with it in the execution of these decisions. It overrode all criticism by reliance on a more or less pliant and automatic majority. It assumed a dictatorial, and sometimes an unpleasantly pedagogic, attitude, not merely to its critics, but in public pronouncements to the people. And it remained always an inaccessible, unsusceptible, inflexible, and dogmatic Government, instructing instead of guiding, hectoring instead of educating the people, with the inevitable result that the country never had an opportunity of shedding itself of its century-old habit of regarding government as an external and doubtfully paternal institution.

Nor has this been the only, or even the deepest, evil. For this Government has been opposed by armed rebellion in

-a rebellion with which it at first cozened, but which it afterwards, and very belatedly, met with armed force. Now here was a manifest opportunity of answering lawlessness with a clear enunciation of the rule of law. Had a statute been enacted, as it would have been enacted in any other self-governing country, describing the nature of the lawlessness that needed to be put down, prescribing penalties according to each offence, and setting up legal tribunals for proof of offence and apportionment of penalty, the people would have been carried forward with the Government toward the goal at which the nation aimed. Possibly the procedure would have proved more cumbrous, but the tuition and popular responsibility would have been completer. Instead of which a mere resolution was introduced, secret military courts were created, and the people, not knowing or following what was being done, were absolved from a conception of responsibility. They were not less determined than the Government that rebellion should be suppressed, whatever the cost, but they remained aloof from the actions of Government because their cognizance and consent were not sought at every stage.

No greater disservice could have been done. The intention was honest, of course. That intention was, in a position of very great difficulty, to find quick roads to speedy ends. But the trouble was that the people were not trained, as they needed to be trained, in the conscious, the open-eyed, the deliberate intention of law and order, until such time as their slumbering reflexes, common to all mankind, had been awakened. They were not being educated by experience in order that practice and habit might be formed in them, during a time of exceptional difficulty, when the national youth had just emerged from a desperate war in which it had learned that the rule of law was the rule of the oppressor and the rule of the revolver the hope of liberation, and before industrial reconstruction had begun to absorb them into productive employment.

The Ministry had not only assumed that government in the new condition of affairs in Ireland could be conducted as it was in other countries, but had actually continued the arbitrary, military methods by which British rule had been compelled to sustain itself in the country. The first would have been a grave

miscalculation: the second was, at the best, a blunder of the first class. It gave the people at large no chance of assuming the responsibility the Constitution placed upon them. For even while Ministers were, with obvious sincerity and manifest earnestness, declaring that the people of Ireland were now masters in their own house, the people never had the sense of that mastery. They had not even the delusive sense of that mastery, such as a Ministry, skilled in its craft, may sometimes for a brief space of time create. They therefore have fallen into a strange apathy, which Ministers themselves have recognized without perceiving the cause of it. They are convinced supporters of the Free State; but they cannot be described as convinced supporters of the Free State Government. They abhor and hate the proceedings of the Irregulars; but they have left the Government alone in its handling of that grave problem. And I believe they will finally, when the next General Election comes, throw out both sides of the contest that has brought such ruin to the country.

VI

Such is the position today. It is not an unnatural one. It is not to be explained by reasons of unnatural and peculiar perversity. Rather is it a position to be understood only by looking into the heart of man and reading aright the laws that have ever prompted its action. So far from being extra-human, it is in fact peculiarly, pathetically human; and therefore worthy of dispassionate and loving examination.

Looked at in this way, the situation is rather one of hope than of despair. The further the pendulum is swung in one direction, the further will it inevitably swing back in the other. History proves nothing more certainly than it proves the law of action and reaction.

Ireland has had its period of lawlessness: it will have its period of legal emphasis. It has had its time of strife: it will have its time of detestation of strife, even to detestation of contention. It has had its hour of destruction: it is, I believe, about to enter upon its hour of construction. It will have a General Election during the course of this year; and I shall not be surprised to see very great and deep changes thereafter. DARRELL FIGGIS.

RECENT BIOLOGY AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

BY VERNON KELLOGG

BIOLOGY is a very generous word. It names a wide field of science, including such special fields as zoology and botany and bacteriology and paleontology and anthropology and psychology. In its applications it includes animal and plant breeding, fisheries and forestry and considerable parts of medicine and agriculture. So that any discussion of recent advances in biology and of its present status and its significance in human life can wander justifiably over a wide territory of science, both pure and applied. In fact, the biologist is only with difficulty kept from claiming considerable parts of several of the humanities and social sciences, especially parts of history and sociology. The modern treatment of history in the manner of that popular amateur historian H. G. Wells includes such a discussion of prehistoric man from Pithecanthropus to Cro-Magnon man as has heretofore seemed to the biologist-anthropologist to belong under his copyright. As for the sociologist, he has for a long time tried to make his subject a scientific one by treating it biologically— even if he knew little biology.

However, the laudable modern movement to do away with the artificial distinctions and barriers which we have for altogether too long tried to maintain here and there within the general field of natural science does not work wholly to the advantage of the biologist intent on seizing adjacent territory. For it permits and justifies the physicist and, especially, the chemist to make forays into the biological field, and to stake out generous claims in it. The modern bio-physicists and bio-chemists are arguing very plausibly that much of so-called biology is really chemistry and physics. The so-called "mechanistic school of biology" is in reality a school of bio-physics and bio-chemistry. Its adherents are almost daily analyzing into mere physics and chemistry some familiar vital phenomenon long sacred as a