4. _The Pauperisation of the Roman Proletariat._--This is the _Panem et Circenses_ policy. Mr. Hodgkin appears to think that in this direction lies the main danger which threatens the British Empire. "Of all the forces," he says, "which were at work for the destruction of the prosperity of the Roman world, none is more deserving of the careful study of an English statesman than the grain-largesses to the populace of Rome.... Will the great Democracies of the twentieth century resist the temptation to use political power as a means of material self-enrichment?" Possibly Mr. Hodgkin is right. The manner in which the leaders of the Paris Commune dealt with the rights of property during their disastrous, but fortunately very brief, period of office in 1871, serves as a warning of what, in an extreme case, may be expected of despotic democracy in its most aggravated form. Moreover, misgovernment, and the fiscal oppression which is the almost necessary accompaniment of militarism dominant over a poverty-stricken population, have latterly developed on the continent of Europe, and more especially in Italy, a school of action--for anarchism can scarcely be dignified by the name of a school of thought--which regards human life as scarcely more sacred than property. It may be that some lower depth has yet to be reached, although it is almost inconceivable that such should be the case. Anarchy takes us past the stage of any defined political or social programme. It would appear, so far as can at present be judged, to embody the last despairing cry of ultra-democracy "Furens." It is permissible to hope that our national sobriety, coupled with the inherited traditions derived from centuries of free government, will save us from such extreme manifestations of democratic tyranny as those to which allusion has been made above. The special danger in England would appear rather to arise from the probability of gradual dry rot, due to prolonged offence against the infallible and relentless laws of economic science. Both British employers of labour and British workmen are insular in their habits of thought, and insular in the range of their acquired knowledge. They do not appear as yet to be thoroughly alive to the new position created for British trade by foreign competition. It is greatly to be hoped that they will awake to the realities of the situation before any permanent harm is done to British trade, for the loss of trade involves as its ultimate result the pauperisation of the proletariat, the adoption of reckless expedients based on the _Panem et Circenses_ policy to fill the mouths and quell the voices of the multitude, and finally the suicide of that Empire which is the offspring of trade, and which can only continue to exist so long as its parent continues to thrive and to flourish.