THE WHICHNESS OF WHY.

Evening Post, Volume LXXV, Issue 27, 1 February 1908, Page 4

THE WHICHNESS OF WHY.

In America, when a man* is neither a good Republican nor a bad Democrat, he is possibly an effete Mugwump —a philosophic doubter sitting on the political rail and .chilling with superior criticism tho honest enthusiasm of acaucus. The precise derivation of Mugwump is lost in the morass of legend, where so many old roots are buried. We suspect that, like Topsy, the word just growed. The satirichl definition of tho Mugwump, as a person educated beyond his intellect, htvs been applied to Mr. A. J. Biilfouv, that "half-light on the traditional "weary Titan." If it were correctly applied, there would still remain need of a definition more closely befitting Mr. Balfour, if the suggestion of a daily journalist may be pardoned, is less a Mugwump than a Balmug. A Balmug wo recognise at once, not as 1 a person educated beyond his intellect, but an a person intellectual beyond his avocation. Or her's ; for in these days of progress the class of Bahnugs is familiarly^ female. We are reminded by the afterthought of those impertinent Radicals who greeted the past hope of the Conservatives as Miss Balfour. So far the hesitations of the Balmug kaJ impressed them. ! For Mr Balfour seemingly lias never convinced him&alf that politics are more than a solemn and ironic game, with the motto of "Let's pretend." It must be owned that he pretends badly. He cannot reconcile his intellectual opinions with tho popular verdict or the party nesd. A Liberal caricaturist recently has been representing Mr. Balfour as an elusive , bird who defies every attempt by the party organisers to put salt on his tail. He will not say the word to unite Balfourites and ChamberlainiteS in Conservative harmony. Had the caricaturist thought a little more deeply he would have drawn th;> bird without a tail, and made it clear that he does not know the word. Convictions are for common men; for Mr .Balfour are unavailing dreams. It i& he himself who, in another iview, spends his speculative lifo in trying to drop salt on the tail of the infinite. A recont cable message Bhows nim, we suppose, in an attitude as happy as ever he has found, lecturing to the studious girls of Newnham on the causes of national decay. In so many aspects this appears a proceeding so suitable to Mr. Balfour, that the Comic Muse of Mr. Meredith, passing tJhrOugh the hall, must have paused to gain . a moment of delight. Fancy attributes gas and fog, a veritable Ragnarok, and sees tho hesitating sex facing a hesitating lecturer, Sprawling amid the: ruins of empires. With a wavering finger he touches the weak spot, and the fragments of a shattered universe fall among the petticoats of fearful girls who have taken all knowledge for their province (as if, parenthetically, they do not know by instinct nil that is worth knowing). Presently there is applause and,afternoon tea, and 'Mr. Balfouv walks, away wondering was it worth while, tvas it really worth while? His malady, of course, is a matter of deficient vitality, vainly pursued on, the golf-links. And between the doubter, delaying and pondering, and the* fanatic madly rushing after the gold at the rainbow's end, surely the race cannot prefer the doubter. Bis insuperable objections to all possible courses end in a nullity of action : the fanatip, who chases the gleam everywhere, will surely' find it somewhore, if it exists at all. His cairn piled for experience- is not ,a' cenotaph. And if he tumbles over us with heavy boots in his hurry, the brtises help to assure us that we are alive after all, nofc dead flies in a contemplative spider's web of if and whether. It is necessary for the world to cultivate its garden; and luckily it does, without bothering too much about the fitness of tho spade. While perplexed philosophers ponder, love and hunger are performing their task — as a local historian remarked when he looked up from his books to see his servant flirting with-, the baker's boy. His profound inefficacy in the scheme of things was brought home to that historian as Mr. Balfour's has, we doubt not, been brought home to female instinct at Newnham. Is philosophy then futile? Logic forbid !•*— since we live by uttering it. But a good tree must bear its fruits ; and all Mr. Balfour's academic dissertations have not apparently, to the overworked and underfed Briton at the base of Britain, the worth of one real reform in the existing structure of his society. While"* the ! grass is growing the steed is starving ; while the causes of decay are being ascertained the decay is, or seems to b&, lotting the national edifice. And the analogy of the British social disease is not to cancer, incurable till its germs are found ; but rather, or at least in some degree, to simple famine. Britons are land-hungry, and monopolists nrevent access to the soil where they could gain subsistence. Better one swingeing graduated land-tax than a whole cycle of Mr. Balfour's speculations.