From the moment we left our camp the Jumbe had loudly proclaimed his conviction that the "Bwanas" would not see the elephant, and even if they did would not be able to kill it, because it was bewitched. As events fell out, he was right in his first prophecy, though I fancy our two Expresses would have lost him his reputation in the second, had we only had the luck to come up with the brute.

Before we left the village to go back to the Siwezi River and our permanent camp, we interviewed three boys, who said they had actually seen the elephant tearing a boy to pieces and stuffing the bits into its mouth. R.'s credulity jibbed at this eating business, and

From what I heard afterwards, the only man to improve his reputation at Patchuni village was the faithful Capitao Selimani, and from the presents

including two chickens and a brand-new sleeping - hat— that I saw him packing away for the return trip, I gathered that the tale, as told by himself, had lost nothing in the telling.

The village, at any rate, was cleared of its raider, and was duly grateful for that small mercy, though despite our best efforts on their behalf, and presuming the story to be true, the bones of the Patchuni ancestors are still journeying around Portuguese East Africa in the stomach of the nastiest elephant we ever encountered.

Army, he dissolved Parliament, and brought upon himself and his colleagues an overwhelming defeat. In France, political crime has a wider scope, and includes within itself murder, shameless and unprovoked. That Germaine Berton, the callous insolent murderer of an admirable man and gallant soldier, Plateau, should have been turned into a heroine by a mob of Anarchists and Communists is an indelible disgrace to France. She would not have escaped unscathed in London, even had our solemn Socialists been in power. A yet clearer proof of lawlessness has since been given in Paris, where the cruel murder of Philippe Daudet goes unpunished. This boy of fourteen, more than a year ago, was decoyed and robbed by the Anarchists, and then handed over to be done to death by the police, for no other reason than that he was the son of his father, Léon Daudet. No viler crime than this has ever been set down to politics since the world began, and we hope and believe that the courage and pertinacity of the father will at last succeed in bringing the malefactors to justice. And we, whose Communists, less cynically logical than their French colleagues, have not travelled quite so far on the road of political crime, should not neglect the warning that has been given us, and resolve that the virus of Communism shall be extracted by the law before it has poisoned the whole politic body.

Now, though we do not esteem very highly either Mr MacDonald or M. Herriot, we cannot assert that they are wholly denuded of intelligence. They are men of some education, who might be supposed to understand the ultimate consequences of their inertia. A slight study of history should have taught them that to yield to disorder is the easiest method of destroying the State. Does Mr MacDonald desire to see the end of Great Britain? Would M. Herriot contemplate without regret the extinction of France by the Communists? Perhaps not. But it is evident that patriotism is to neither of them a sustaining force. They are both terrorised by the extreme members of their Parties. They dare not oppose these extreme members, because they think that they cannot do without their votes, and they drift hopelessly on an uncharted sea, in the vague hope that some day or other they may come to land again. The love of office makes them ready to take any risk, so long as they are permitted to "lead," if so timid a business as toadying political criminals may be called leadership. And if in the meantime disaster, complete and irretrievable, overtakes their countries, they may still follow the example of Kerensky and escape with whole skins.

And what, when in a few years we look back upon it, will appear incomprehensible, these two middle-class senti

mentalists, Mr MacDonald and M. Herriot, seem ready to ruin the countries whose government was lately entrusted to one of them, and is still in the hands of the other, at the dictation of Russia. In the arts of life, in civilisation, England and France are infinitely superior to Russia. The Western Powers have an older tradition of order and happiness, of scholarship and literature, than the Eastern. Yet without question or dispute Mr MacDonald was, and M. Herriot is, ready to force the countries of their birth beneath the sway of the Russian Soviet. And they do it not in total ignorance. They have visited Russia; they have seen as much as their Russian masters have thought fit to show them; they have learned, or they might have learned, the history, bloodstained and ruinous, of the Russian revolution. They know, or they might have known, that the blessings of Communism conferred upon Russia have ensured a cruel and bitter tyranny, have meant the extinction of scholarship and science, have included the death and torture of all those who did the work, public and private, of the country. Knowing all this, do they, then, desire to see their own lands decimated and dishonoured morally and physically, or do they submit in panic to the pitiless dictation of lunatics and criminals?

Whatever their motives may be, their conduct has been the same. Mr MacDonald, as we

No

have said, sacrificed himself and his Party to the demands of Russia. M. Herriot is piously walking in Mr MacDonald's footsteps. Not only has France also acknowledged the government of the Soviet; she has received M. Krassin, the first ambassador accredited to France by the Russian revolutionaries, as a conquering hero. general, returning from the field of victory, was ever more loudly acclaimed than was M. Krassin when he entered Paris in state. His entry was an excuse for such a demonstration of Communism as never was seen, save when the dishonoured bones of Jean Jaurés were carried pompously to the Pantheon, that temple of anarchy, where they will lie, without rest, by the side of the bones of Rousseau, the chief among all stirrers - up of strife. And these two occasions of public rejoicing revealed even to the Socialist Government of France what was known to all unbiassed observers -the existence in Paris of a Communist plot. Even M. Herriot himself was forced to take action, and he took it after his own fashion. Lest he should insult the tender susceptibilities of Communists, who were (and are) threatening revolution, he publicly declared that the worst enemies of the public peace were the clerical party, and that, compared with them, the Communists were almost harmless. He thus succeeded in involving in one common charge

loyal and disloyal, and made himself obnoxious to both Parties. That all men called conspuez after him in the street was the natural result of his policy; and while he could find no ground of complaint against the clericals, he could not avoid making a pretended raid upon the Lenin school at Bobigny, a northern suburb of Paris.

Now at Bobigny there is established a school of militant Communism, which is named, appropriately, after Lenin, the high priest of disorder. There young Communists are taught the art of revolution, trained in the use of arms, and instructed in all the subtle practices of propaganda. The school does not lack money, and the young rebels are paid as much as 600 francs a month for their complacency in learning how best the country in which they live may be destroyed. And when the amiable course of instruction is finished, the young students return to their own homes, and become the centres of disturbance there. It is a simple plan, which, if it be not checked, may reduce a prosperous and smiling France to those depths of misery, vice, squalor, and death which Russia has plumbed. Will the plan be checked? There seems no certainty. The Government, half in love with revolution itself, cannot take strong measures of suppression. The poor foolish steps with which it totters towards a policy will not carry it far. When M.

Herriot, to allay a possible panic, made a raid upon the school of Bobigny, his friends of the Lenin school were duly warned. The most dangerous Communists, who might have been arrested, left quietly, without the indignity of haste, before the photographers came, and they were busy on the spot an hour before the police.

It has been said that the affairs of a foreign country do not affect us. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Tunc tua res agitur paries quum proximus ardet." How shall England escape if France be on fire? Nothing travels so swiftly as the flame of rebellion. Indeed, the faggots are already laid in our midst, and there needs but a match to set them alight. In other words, we also have our Communist school, which differs in no way from that already established at Bobigny. Its aim also is revolution, and its method is propaganda. It is efficiently organised, and is inspired, perhaps, by the same conspirators to whose ruthlessness the Lenin school of Paris is due. The syllabus of the English school's terminal course has lately come into our hands, and a few extracts from this syllabus will make its purpose clear to our readers. The substance of Lesson I. is simple and necessary. Thus it runs: "Education and training in our ranks. Party programme as basis for the course. the course. Understanding the Party programme as a minimum qualification for member