August 7, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER, 
DAWN WIND OF A NEW DAY. 
By The Editor. 
THE old strong sense seems to have largely 
evaporated froih the Anglo-Saxon word 
" ordeal." To the majority it means Httle 
more than a painful lest or experience. 
That it once signified a judgment to be de- 
creed by Heaven is overlooked. In those former times 
it was held that a man's courage in confronting pain or 
facing death was the fruit of honesty of heart and 
sincerity of soul. The opening Act of Shakespeare's 
" Richard H." contains the chissic description of how 
men faced death in the ordeal of battle : 
As gentle and as jocund as to jest 
Co I to fight : trulh lialh a quiet breast. 
vSo spoke Norfolk. And John of Gaunt's last 
words to his son, Harry of Hereford, when he was 
about to enter the lists, must have often found an echo 
in English hearts during the past twelve months : 
" Rouse up thy youthful blood, be valiant and live." 
It was through the inspiration tliat lightens so vividly 
many of the pages of his book that Mr. F. S. Oliver 
chose for its title " Ordeal by Battle." Britain is prov- 
ing her cause at the sword's point " on pain to be found 
false and recreant." The reader must comprehend all 
that the title connotes in its original sense in order 
to do full justice to this volume, which is not only a 
great book in itself, but is a begetter of books, for it 
\yill inspire many pens. 
It is not our intention to review Mr. Oliver's latest 
work : it has already been done cursorily in Land and 
Water. Our present abject is to lay hold on certain 
statements of fact and expressions of faith and to bring 
them prominently forward, believing, as we do, that 
they may prove to be corner-stones in the new fabric of 
government and social order which we are sanguine 
enough to believe shall yet arise under a fair sky when 
the carnage is stayed and tiie dust and smoke of battle 
have cleared away. " When men are thrown into the 
crucible of a war such as this the true ore will tend to 
run together, the dross to cake upon the surface. No 
matter to what parties liiey may have originally owed 
allegiance, the men who are in earnest and who see 
realities cannot help but come together." The process 
is already in operation before our eyes, if we have only 
the eyes to see it. " Will the generation which is fight- 
ing this war — such as them as may survive — be con- 
tent to go back to the old barren wrangle when it is 
done? " Never. And we hold it to be the duty of us 
who sit at home to clear the ground against their re- 
turn ; to root up the noxious weeds of party faction and 
class prejudices, to burn in the fire of scorn worn-out 
conventions and weak habits of thought and conduct. 
We must bare the site of the rubble that has accumu- 
lated during the easy years of peace, not forgetting that 
this rubble may conceal noble stone and metal fit for a 
temple of the living God. 
" It would be wise to take to heart the lesson, 
plainly written across the record of the last nine months, 
that the present confusion of our political system is re- 
sponsible as much as anything for the depreciated 
currency of public character. The need is obvious for 
a Parliament and a Government chosen by the Himpire, 
responsible to the Empire, and charged with the 
security of the Empire, and with no other task." The 
need has been beheld for years by those who have served 
the Empire beyond the narrow seas, but to speak or to 
write about it was only to provoke the laughter of fools, 
the crackling of thorns imder a pot. The Party System 
was vigorous when Macaulay uttered his warning that 
India would be lost on the floor of the House of 
('ommons. In its decadence we have come near to 
losing not India only but the whole heritage of Empire 
on that very spot. " The typical Party leader has been 
neither a man in the heroic sense nor has he liad any 
belief that could be called firm or clear. For the most 
19 
part he has been merely a Whig or Tory tradesman 
dealing in opportunism." We cannot go back to this con- 
dition of affairs. The blood of our loved ones, the blood 
of our kinsmen, cries aloud against it. They who have 
not allowed themselves "to be deceived by the make- 
believe wares of the Party System," and who have kept 
clear of " that elaborate machinery by means of which 
the Sovereign People is cajoled into the belief that its 
Will prevails," have seen all too clearly the approach 
of the peril, and though they realise in sorrow how need- 
lessly heavy the bloodshed has been, yet are they grate- 
ful, for they know to-day by how near a thing the 
Empire has escaped disruption through being steered by 
the Party System on to the rocks of dissension in that 
hour of supreme crisis a year ago. How close it came 
to the commission of the unpardonable sin we shudder 
to think. Never, never again must that be possible. 
Kipling, in the " History of England " which he 
compiled with Mr. Fletcher, has a poem called " The 
Dawn Wind." This natural phenomenon deeply im- 
pressed itself on the poet's imagination at the very out- 
set of his career. It is perhaps more familiar to 
dwellers in tropical lands : 
At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and list«ii. 
You will hear the feet of tlie Wind that is going to call the sun. 
And the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten. 
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done. 
So when the world is asleep and there seems no hope of her waking 
Out of some long, bivd dream that makes her mutter uid moan. 
Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking, 
And everyone smiles at his neighbour, and tells him his soul is hi» 
Is it the mere delusion of a man who, lying on a 
fevered bed in the hot darkness of Indian nights, has 
himself often listened eagerly for the first flutter of the 
Dawn Wind, that beholds in these sentences of Mr. 
Oliver the sure sign that a new day is at hand? " The 
characteristics of the period (immediately preceding the 
war)," he writes, " may be summed up in one short 
sentence ; the vast majority of the British people were 
bent and determined — as they had never been bent and 
determined before — upon leaving their country better 
than they had found it." And he goes on to speak of 
the restlessness tiiat has accompanied this resolution, 
which is just like " the restless Wind fidgeting far 
down the road." Here v^e must quit the analogy. The 
new day will not dawn if we are content to sit still and 
watch for it. There must be " the noise of fetters 
breaking," and it is we who must do the breaking. 
It has come to be a habit to throw the blame for all 
the errors of government on tiie lawyer mind, which has 
preponderated in the national councils in recent years. 
Writes Mr. Oliver : " Lawyers see too much of life in one 
way, too little in another, to make them safe guides in 
practical matters. Their experience of human affairs is 
made up of an infinite number of scraps out of other 
people's lives. They learn and do hardly anything ex- 
cept through intermediaries. . . . The lawyer's 
errors for the most part are visited on others. His own 
success or non-success is largely a matter of words and 
pose." " There is nothing either good or bad, 
but Uilking makes it so." On tliis assumption the 
State has been governed. It is as though we had 
been treading tlie deceptive greensward of a swamp 
and had suddenly broken through and been immersed 
up to the armpits in the holding mire. But, in criticis- 
ing the faults of lawyers, let us beware of falling our- 
selves into the same pit. We cannot state too clearly 
or explicitly that the people, each and all, with rare ex- 
ceptions are to blame for what has happened, and that 
if there is to be a new Reformation it can only be 
brought about by every person reforming himself or 
herself and by disHiarging in a more sincere and livelier 
manner individual duly to God and neighbour. 
