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please, Sir, I should like to know whose servant I am.' 'Well, Henry, you were engaged to look after both of us, weren't you?' Yes, Sir. No trouble about that, Sir. But you see, Sir, if I'm his lordship's servant I sit next to the housekeeper, and if I'm your servant I sit next the Hon. Miss maid-which I should prefer, Sir.'"

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His frankness surely deserved the reward of the Hon. Miss -'s maid for his next. Mrs Peel tells us of an old lady, well-known in the North of England, who gnawed her chicken-bones-that is, took them in her fingers and bit the meat off them-and said that 'as children we were allowed to gnaw our chicken-bones because, according to our nurse, Queen Victoria did it.' This legend ran in many a house. But we do not know what the etiquette about chicken-bones was, or even what it is, below stairs.

As between upper servants and lower the distance was marked then as it is marked still; and the right commanding officer of a lower servant was not the master who paid him but his immediate upper. Mr Hamley in 'Wives and Daughters,' as cited by Mrs Peel, had broken this iron rule and had, himself, spoken winged words to a footman. On which the justly offended butler observed, 'Anger's a good thing for Thomas' (the footman). He needs a deal of it. But it should have come from the right quarter-and that is me myself, Mr Osborne. I know my place, and I know my duties as well as any butler that lives. And it's my duty to scold Thomas, and not master's.' No doubt Thomas got some of that anger which was such 'good medicine' for him from the butler also; but that could not take the edge off the master's offending.

What is the rule governing a host's rights to see that the water brought to a guest's bedroom is properly warm? Is it permitted to the host to test it with his own fingertip or is it a duty to be scrupulously left to the servant who is the water carrier? Lord Fisher has a story to the point, of a visit to King Edward at Sandringham when Lord Redesdale was a fellow guest:

'The King was there alone' (he means, without Queen Alexandra) 'and Lord Redesdale and myself were the only guests. The King was very fond of Redesdale, and rightly

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He was a most delightful man, He and I were sitting

in the garden near dinner-time. The King came up and said it was time to dress, and he went up in the lift, leaving Redesdale in the garden. Redesdale had a letter to write and rushed up to his bedroom to write it behind a screen there was between him and the door; the door opened, and in came the King, thinking he had left Redesdale in the garden, and went to the wash-hand-stand and felt the water to see if it was hot, and went out again. Perhaps his water had been cold, but anyhow he came to see if his guest's was all right.'

Is not that a pleasant picture of King Edward as host? It will lose nothing of effect if we end up with another, as pendant to it, of the same Royal and very human personage as guest-this time from Lady Londonderry's book:

'On one occasion, when King Edward, as Prince of Wales, was visiting Blankney, Mr Chaplin's small son, Eric, was in his room while he was dressing for dinner. On the dressingtable stood a bowl of Indian corn from which he was in the habit of feeding the pigeons from his window. After his father had gone down to dinner, the small boy had a brilliant idea of spreading a layer of corn between the lower sheet and the blanket on the father's bed. When the exhausted host of a large house-party retired at a late hour, sleep was found to be impossible from a pricking discomfort beneath him.

'Investigation followed, and it was not until a housemaid had been roused and the bed re-made that the long-suffering parent obtained his rest. When the children came down according to custom the next morning while the guests were at breakfast, the story was told with some humour by the victim. The Prince, delighted by a practical joke very much after his own heart, gave the boy a sovereign, with the promise of another should it be repeated!'

We are left wondering what happened to Master Eric Chaplin, besides getting the sovereign. Another speculation of some interest is what would have happened to King Edward if he, as a small boy, had played a like prank on his own august father.

HORACE G. HUTCHINSON.

Art. 2.-THE STATE AND MODERN DEMOCRACY. THE natural history of the state has not yet been completely written. Neither has the study of the state's essential functions been put upon a real historical basis, although Professor Oppenheimer a few years ago wrote one or two important chapters of that study. At a time in the history of European civilisation when there is an insistent demand for the intervention of the state in industrial and social affairs, and when half-articulate demands for freedom and justice are made by a partially educated democracy, it is important to know this natural history and to understand what relationships the modern state bears to democracy.

We know fairly well the relationship the state of Athens bore to the Athenian democracy, a democracy limited and direct. The Athenian citizen expressed his individuality either directly in his daily pursuits, or through broad-based and popular institutions like his priesthood, his games and the state. The citizen functioned directly in the public assembly and in other activities, including war and the holding of public offices. It has been maintained with a certain degree of plausibility that the too open nature of Athenian democracy was the cause of her downfall in the long struggle with Sparta. Modern communities are much larger, even as cities apart from their organisation as nations, and this direct participation in public affairs of national character becomes impossible, leading to the representative principle in modern democracies. We are beset on the one hand with the possibilities of an inefficient anarchy where functional organisations are at a discount, and on the other hand with the dead hand of closed bureaucracy, to which the overloading of the state with industrial functions would lead. We have emerged slowly to democracy from a condition of feudalism, the antithesis of democracy, the characteristic of which is to seek the most complete expression of the individual's personality on the widest possible franchise. That wide franchise has to be political, industrial, artistic and moral, and this expression of modern democracy can only be effected through functional organisations, working in those fields of activity, in collaboration with a popularly elected

organisation of true state activities. Democracy is not simply a form of government (such must to a certain extent be bureaucratic), but is an attitude of mind to government and all other forms of human activity which presupposes an active and alert interest in them and a certain jealousy of undue encroachment on private feelings and actions. It also assumes a respect for other personalities and consequently is a disciplined freedom.

Theoretically, no doubt, the modern state should have a close correspondence with modern democracy. But contemporaneous things have seldom the affinities we would expect to find by abstract reasoning. The established state is always a survival from a more remote age from which it claims its sanctions, and recognising this fact we should expect to find, not only faint traces of past functions, but an overwhelming sense of incongruity between the expressions of its power and purpose and the aims of modern democracy. Democracy, as we have come to understand it, is not a survival from the distant past, but in its modern garb it is a new thing in the world; a thing incomplete and partially dressed in the swaddling clothes of ancient shibboleths, and incomplete knowledge of its own purposes and those of the functional institutions which were old and persistent in society when it came to birth.

It may be said that if one institution has been discussed thoroughly, it is that of the state. The complaint is made, indeed, that the state's activities rather than the life of peoples have been the constant theme of historians and political philosophers. The complaint is valid; but we have to realise that it is the histories of established great states which have been narrated, historical states which were taken for granted, and whose fundamental bases have not been explored, but only their juridical and military history, since establishment. There has been little discussion concerning the necessary nature of the state and its functions in society, and little inquiry concerning the origin of the idea of the state, and the development of that idea.

No doubt, states did not come into existence in the first instance as ideas, but were built upon accomplished facts of supremacy. The ruler or tyrant probably preceded any philosophy of the state, and yet the state in

a proper sense could not be said to have existed until the idea of the functions a ruler should perform had been elaborated to a certain degree. In this development of the idea of the state, however, there has been a tendency to discover for it mythical origins on the one hand, and on the other hand a tendency to conduct the inquiry in a spirit of unhistorical rationalism, developing it as a pure abstract idea in vacuo. The latter, indeed, has succeeded in making a bogey of the state, something awe-inspiring and terrible and remote from human feelings. It has conduced very little to the elucidation of the obscurities and difficulties with which the subject is surrounded. People are afraid to inquire into the origins of the state because rationalists have so stressed its juristic aspect as to give it an air of infallibility and omniscience. Humbler people feel that to probe into its natural history and functions is to disturb the very basis of law and order, and to undermine the stability of civilised life. Most histories are written as justifications for the actions of powerful men and bodies quite as much as explanations of the cause of events, even if the bodies justified have a life measured by centuries. The peculiar position held by the state has made it, not only the successful litigant in dispute, but also the judge and jury in its own case as well as the censor of public opinion; so that even contemporary evidence, which might have been unfavourable to its claims in particular instances, is suppressed. Those actions are generally called vindicating justice, which in this sense is always the right of the more powerful.

History is the record of justification for the soldiers, statesmen and lawgivers who have been successful in imposing their will upon peoples. It weighs evidence by the forms of juridical procedure, and is even capable of creating a legal myth to explain and justify oppression. Such legal fictions are the doctrines of 'natural law' and the law of previous accumulation,' fictions designed to justify the harsh property laws of Rome, and the appropriations of the fruits of labour by powerful persons throughout the ages. But although many of the activities of the state are based on legal fictions, that fact does not make the state any the less strong, for a legal fiction as a metaphysic is often beyond the

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