two distinct kinds of rebellion are obviously included—the rising of subject nationalities against a dominant power, as in Greece, Italy, the Caucasus, India, and Ireland; and the rising of subjects against their own Government, as in France, Russia, Persia, and Turkey, or in England in the case of the Suffragettes. It is difficult to say which kind is the more detested and punished with the greater severity by the central authority attacked. Was the Nationalist rising in the Caucasus or the Baltic Provinces suppressed with greater brutality than the almost simultaneous rising of Russian subjects in Moscow? I witnessed all three, and I think it was; chiefly because soldiers have less scruple in the slaughter and violation of people whose language they do not understand. Did our Government feel greater animosity towards the recent Indian movement or the Irish movement of thirty years ago than towards the rioters for the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867? I think they did. Vengeance upon external or Nationalist rebels is incited by racial antipathy. But, on the other hand, the outside world is more ready to applaud a Nationalist rebellion, especially if it succeeds, and we feel a more romantic affection for William Tell or Garibaldi than for Oliver Cromwell or Danton; I suppose because it is easier to imagine the splendour of liberty when a subject race throws off a foreign yoke.

So the history of rebellion involves us in a mesh of contradictions. Rebels have been generally regarded as deserving more terrible penalties than other criminals, yet all the world loves a rebel, at a distance. Nationalist rebellions are crushed with even greater ferocity than the internal rebellions of a State, and yet the leaders of Nationalist rebellions are regarded by the common world with a special affection of hero-worship. Obviously, we are here confronted with two different standards of conduct. On one side is the standard of Government, the States and Law, which denounces the rebel, and especially the Nationalist rebel, as the worst of sinners; on the other side we have the standard of the individual, the soul and liberty, which loves a rebel, especially a Nationalist rebel, and denies that he is a sinner at all.

Let us leave the Nationalist rebel, whose justification is now almost universally admitted (except by the dominant Power), even if he is unsuccessful, and consider only the rebel inside the State—the rebel against his own Leviathan—whose position is far more dubious. Job's Leviathan appears to have been a more fearsome and powerful beast than the elephant, but in India the elephant is taken as the symbol of wisdom, and when an Indian boy goes in for a municipal examination, he prays to the elephant-god for assistance. Now the ideal State of the elephant is the herd, and yet this herd of wisdom sometimes develops a rebel or "rogue" who seems to be striving after some fresh manner of existence and works terrible havoc among the elephantine conventions. Usually the herd combines to kill him and there is an end of the matter. Yet I sometimes think that the occasional and inexplicable appearance of the "rogue" at intervals during many thousand years may really have been the origin of that wisdom to which the Indians pray.

Similarly, mankind, which sometimes surpasses even the elephant in wisdom, has been continually torn between the idol of the Herd and the profanity of the rebel or Rogue, and it is perhaps through the rebel—the variation, as Darwin would call him—that man makes his advance. The rebel is what distinguishes our States and cities from the beehives and ant-heaps to which they are commonly compared. The progress of ants and bees appears to have been arrested. They seem to have developed a completely socialised polity thousands of years ago, perhaps before man existed, and then to have stopped—stopped dead, as we say. But mankind has never stopped. If a country's progress is arrested—if a people becomes simply conservative in habits, they may die slowly, like Egypt, or quickly, likes Sparta, but they die and disappear, unless inspired by new life, like Japan, or by revolution, like France and possibly Russia. For, as we are almost too frequently told, change is the law of human life.

And may not this be just the very reason we are seeking for—the very reason why all the world loves a rebel, at a distance? Perhaps the world unconsciously recognises in him a symbol of change, a symbol of the law of life. We may not like him very near us—not uncomfortably near, as we say. For most change is uncomfortable. When I was shut up for many weeks in a London hospital, I felt a shrinking horror of going out, as though my skin had become too tender for this rough world. After I had been shut up for four months in a siege, daily exposed to shells, bullets, fever, and starvation, I felt no relief when the relief came, but rather a dread of confronting the perils of ordinary life. So quickly does the curse of stagnation fall upon us. And in support of stagnation are always ranged the immense forces of Society, the prosperous, the well-to-do, the people who are content if to-morrow is exactly like to-day. In support of stagnation stands the power of every kind of government—the King who sticks to his inherited importance, the Lords who stick to their lands and titles, the experts who stick to their theories, the officials who stick to their incomes, routine, and leisure, the Members of Parliament who stick to their seats.

But even more powerful than all these forces in support of stagnation is the enormous host of those whose first thought is necessarily their daily bread—men and women who dare not risk a change for fear of to-morrow's hunger—people for whom the crust is too uncertain for its certainty to be questioned. We often ask why it is that the poor—the working-people—endure their poverty and perpetual toil without overwhelming revolt. The reason is that they have their eyes fixed on the evening meal, and for the life of them they dare not lose sight of it.

So the rebel need never be afraid of going too fast. The violence of inertia—the suction of the stagnant bog—is almost invincible. Like the horse, we are creatures of cast-iron habit. We abandon ourselves easily to careless acquiescence. We make much of external laws, and, like a mother bemused with torpid beer when she overlays her child, we stifle the law of the soul because its crying is such a nuisance. Like a new baby, a new thought is fractious, restless, and incalculable. It saps our strength; it gives us no peace; it exposes a wider surface to pain. There is something indecent, uncontrolled, and unconscionable about it. Our friends like it best when it is asleep, and they like us better when it is buried.

There is very little danger of rebellion going too far. The barriers confronting it are too solid, and the Idol of the Herd is too carefully enshrined. A perpetual rebellion of every one against everything would give us an insecure, though exciting, existence, and we are protected by man's disposition to obedience and his solid love of custom. Against the first vedettes of rebellion the army of routine will always muster, and it gathers to itself the indifferent, the startled cowards, the thinkers whose thought is finished, the lawyers whose laws are fixed—an innumerable host. They proceed to treat the rebels as we have seen. In all ages, rebellion has been met by the standing armies of permanence. If captured, it is put to the ordeal of fire and water, so as to try what stuff it is made of. Faith is rebellion's only inspiration and support, and a deal of faith is needed to resist the battle and the test. It was in thinking of the faith of rebels that an early Christian writer told of those who, having walked by faith, have in all ages been tortured, not accepting deliverance; and others have had trial of mockings and scourgings, and of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered