of the “Conquerors.” He wanders desolately from the oppression of the club to the oppression of an artistic and literary gathering; and thence to the futility of the philanthropic attempt to elevate the lower classes by chess and coffee and bagatelle. He notes the well-fed, bullet-headed, jovial crowds in the streets, the wives and husbands who have settled down to a routine of affection, the wives and husbands who have settled down to a routine of dull hatred and acceptance. The complacency of it all, its satisfaction, its docility, its absence of high purpose and adventure, haunt him like a nightmare. He essays the countryside with no better result. He stays a night with a lonely vicar. He beholds a warder guarding the huge convict prison--symbol of the unsuitability of Christianity to practical affairs. He walks the English roads with an energetic Indian civilian, who is very content to run the machine, without caring to inquire whether the machine is worth running at all. Finally, in the atmosphere of the English country house, serene and dominant, and triumphantly content, he realises that he is not of this company. Some disturbing madness has come upon him, which compels him to inquire, where other men are content to enjoy. And that way lies madness--or the struggle up a hill path, difficult and extended, towards some new form of sanity. So he brands them with some contempt and some anger as “Pharisees”--the island Pharisees, who have mistaken the accident of their own favoured circumstances for the reward of merit, and now present an invincible complacency to all the arrows of outrageous fortune. In such a condemnation he is something less than just to a race which has been considerably misjudged and misunderstood. The men and women which fall under the lash of Mr. Galsworthy’s satire have none of the historic characteristics of the Pharisee. Their ancestors may have thanked God that they were not as other men are. These are but astonished that the distinction was noticeable or important. The “other men” have vanished from the picture. They would be acknowledged to be of common blood, common faith, common nationality. But they so readily pass unnoticed that it would seem a work of supererogation to drag them on to the stage at all. The standard of life which is only maintained by the labour of obscure persons becomes accepted as normal; to be received without questioning. It is less easy, indeed, to excite questions than to propound answers. In the study of the psychology of “Space” and “Time” the student is familiar with the difficulty, not of explanation but of inquiry: “here is space, here is time--What is all the pother about?” is the attitude of the plain man. And “here is human life, as we know it,” is the attitude of the “plain man” in the class where is accepted as fixed and unalterable, that the services of many shall minister to the comfort of the few. The “Conquerors” have got far beyond the stage of the Pharisee.