but it was certainly complimentary to us, and the action of the British Government was simply amazing. Sir Edward Grey allowed himself to be made a party to the Russian ultimatum, and seems to have joined in the demand for the removal of Mr. Shuster, because Mr. Shuster has committed the intolerable offence of appointing two or three Englishmen to help in the upbuilding of the Persian State! That we should be aiding Russia to violate our agreement with her and should condone her invasion of Persia on such grounds is humiliation indeed. It proves, we are afraid, the danger of allowing the permanent policy of the Foreign Office to be controlled by friends and admirers of the St. Petersburg bureaucracy. No wonder that from India we hear voices of protest. Those who use the word "prestige" on frivolous occasions should have known how not to abuse it and sacrifice it in a case where it represented something substantial.

The history of the king's evil and the royal touch, whether as a picture in detail of a certain stream of a very ancient tradition, or as a particular instance of something more than a tradition or symbol, of a mystic interpretation of man's relation to the unseen powers which encompass him, is a deeply interesting study. We are far from imputing it as a fault to Dr. Raymond Crawfurd if, in his scholarly decision to keep to his own part of a great subject, and to do thoroughly what he undertook, he has averted his eye from the ancient sources of the mystery, or even neglected the facts

"The King's Evil." By Dr. Raymond Crawfurd. Pp. 187. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1911.) Price 8s. 6d. net.

and fables which linked up the modern and the ancient modes of miraculous healing. Still, has not Dr. Crawfurd almost dissembled these sources of the far past and the ancient myth? He remarks, for instance, that the gods "have transmitted the gift" (of healing) to mortal man-especially to conspicuous individuals such as kings; to Pyrrhus, for example, or Vespasian. And a few sentences farther on (p. 10) he says that, with the spread of Christianity, the priest “usurped" for a while the prerogative of healing. This seems scarcely the right color to put upon the past. Samuel looked upon Saul as the usurper of intercessory functions. And the gift of healing was not so much a "transmission" from gods to men as

that in this function the priest-king originally was the organ rather than the agent of the supernatural; originally the potency was not so much a delegation as a continuity.

The laying on of hands, as practised for disease in England and France, and as still practised in the institution of Holy Orders, passed by insensible gradations from gods and godlings to heroes and men. Any kindred touch might convey its influence, even the touch of a relic of the operative personage. From this point of view, in Greece, xep and Sivapuus were equivalent. And in various times and circumstances the manual act might pass a stream of virtue from healer to patient, or might be a manumission, or a protective gesture, or merely a symbol. Clearly, in the idea of the royal touch, it stood for more than a symbol.

The "soothing-handed" Chiron, Eileithyiæ, Apollo, Hygieia, poured forth their virtue to Asclepius. Serapis, the mother of God, Cosmas and Damian, and onward, until we take up the modern part of the story with Dr. Crawfurd, from Robert the Pious (996-1031 A.D.). If in view of the inclination of the readers of Nature towards evolution I have ventured to knit up a few of these ancient links, from the beginning of his own story Dr. Crawfurd is an indispensable guide. From the first we feel we are in good hands; the scrupulous references to authorities, the exploration of the sources, many of which the author has either brought to light or has set in their proper light, the first glance at the scholarly translations from the Latin, or at the excellent bibliography, and, above all, the sound criticism not unspiced with humor, give the reader a sense of completeness and sureness. The subject of the royal touch had not been adequately treated; Dr. Crawfurd has been fortunate in his subject, and has pro

duced an exhaustive and probably a final study of it.

Magic touch in ancient times was valid not for a few but for all or any diseases and for parturition. In the Middle Ages, however, it had become restricted to jaundice the morbus regius-and to bubos. For the jaundice the touch soon fell out of use; the bubos were chiefly of the scrofulous kind, but Dr. Crawfurd supposes that not a few ambulant cases of bubonic plague (lues inguinaria) were included in the crowd. At a later date probably syphilis came in, a disease not mentioned, I think, by the author, though as he has forgotten an index-the only defect in his scholarly apparatus-I cannot be sure of this. In one of the Continental galleries I remember a picture, of the early sixteenth century, commemorating a cure by a miracleworking saint, in which the patient, exhibited in his own person a fine specimen of syphilitic ulceration and of the painter's veracity.

If we regard the laying on of hands as an ancient prerogative, one deriving from the larger function of "Binding and Loosing," we attach less importance to the defects of the records of its appearance in modern times; we guess that this mystery never died out; that the lack of records is due to their destruction, or to silence on matters of familiar custom. Still, Dr. Crawfurd is as precise as sources will allow, and it is not without interest to note that, if in France the definite history of the touch begins with Robert the Pious, yet the legends of the times of Clovis suggest in this respect also the continuity of Gallo-Roman ritual. With Clovis, as with later kings of England and France, with Queen Anne for instance, the assumption of this prerogative may have been to prove that he too was hedged about with divinity. England, in her comparative isolation from the Roman tradition, records no

Heroes to make us in despite. They'll know full soon the kind of vermin

Our bullets hit in this last fight.

Whatever love of goodness this may inspire in the mind of a child, it is not through a very high order of poetics or politeness.

The harm these Socialist Sundayschols are effecting is inestimable. Mr. H. M. Hyndman, speaking at Burnley on June 5 last year, said:

We are getting the children with us. We are getting those who will be the vigorous people of the next generation. That is the real future of the people of this country-the education of the children to Socialism.

Here is the raison d'être of the Socialist Sunday-school. The development of popular education has brought us face to face with a new danger-a democracy nurtured from childhood in the spirit of the social revolution, and fraught with possibilities too terrible to contemplate. It involves the death of patriotism and the triumph of the Red International, the usurpation of faith's abiding-place by materialism and atheism.

It must not be imagined that it is only the children of socialists who attend these schools. There are many parents who permit their children to imbibe this iniquitous teaching because they do not trouble to inquire as to its character. They imagine that it resembles the instruction given in the Church of England Sunday-schools. Invariably the excuse is that there is no other place near enough to the child's home, and that in the Socialist Sunday-school the parents have somewhere handy to send the child should they wish to go out for the afternoon. As for the teachers to whose charge the children are entrustel, they are for the most part young and enthusiastic Socialists, who have been aptly

described as "knowing little and doubting nothing."

That the popularity of this teaching has been partly fostered by the terrible economic conditions which oppress the poor to-day cannot be doubted; but the question may be asked: Is the Church losing its grip on the lives of the people?-is it indeed doing all it can to aid and comfort the lower classes in the bitter struggle for existence which faces them at every turn, destructive of all hope and self-reliance? There is ample evidence that, side by side with the remarkable growth of the Socialist Sunday-schools, the Church Sunday-schools are losing ground. Most people will recall the Bishop of London's vigorous criticism of the latter, contained in his letter to the diocese at the beginning of the year, and the appeal which his lordship then made for their reorganization.

The appointment by the Bishop last July of a Director of Sunday-schools is of course a step forward in the right direction, but still much remains to be done. Although there are many millions of children attending Church Sunday-schools, yet there are thousands of Socialist Sunday scholars; and while this in itself is sufficiently disquieting, there are other factors even more alarming, one of which is the amazing popularity of a class of teaching which is opposed to that of the Church, and which is being spread more and more among the children every day. If there were only one Socialist Sundayschool, or if there were only a few children receiving atheistic instruction, instead of over six thousand, as at present, the situation would be sufficiently alarming to warrant some speedy counter-action by the Church. But, after all, this is not merely a matter appealing to Anglicans only. Every denomination should find the work of saving the children nearest its hand. One rejoices to know that there is an organ

royal touch before Edward the Confessor.

If it was not until much later times that the kings became specialists in scrofula the previous vagueness depended largely on that of contemporary diagnosis. And here we come to matter of interest to our faith-healers of to-day; to the partnership of physician and priest or king-priest or king as the touch was, generally speaking, conducted under an imposing courtly and religious ceremony. Dr. Crawfurd carefully reproduces the Offices as modified from time to time, and he tells us that the enthusiasm of the sick was thus exalted to an amazing passion. Moreover, the king's physicians took a prominent part, not only in protecting him from crowds of sufferers of a nondescript kind, or of kinds not amerable to the royal touch, but actively in securing this blessing for the cases in which their skill had failed, and for persons in whom they were interested. Passing over earlier and cruder ages, we may descend in time to so great a man as Wiseman, the really distinguished, sagacious, and learned sergeant surgeon to Charles, the Second, who said of his master's potency, with probably more than a courtier's sincerity, that "he cureth more in any one year than all the Chirurgions of London have done in an age." This testimony is the more remarkable as Wiseman was not himself officially concerned with the ceremony. In one passage, indeed, Wiseman attributes a relapse to the loss of the angel from the neck of the patient. Like Alexander of Tralles, good doctor as for his time he was, he still clung to amulets and such magic. We read then with no surprise the devout appreciations of such men as Fuller and Collier. Shortly before Wiseman, we have the curious story, one better known to medical men, of the arraignment of one Leverett, at the instance of Wil

liam Clowes the Younger, surgeon to Charles the First, before the College of Physicians for his imposture, which this august body had no difficulty in proving by convincing evidence of facts, in pretending to vie with the king in the power of curing the evil, even by methods still more magical. We do not find, however, that the College did the fairest thing in its power; it might have put the King and Leverett severally to trial on the same patient or patients. But, as Clowes aptly remarked, Leverett was not even a seventh son of a seventh son; he proved to be only the fourth. He was a hollow rogue.

Still, the sceptic had crept near the ears of his world, even at an early date; not always knowing himself to be a sceptic. John of Gaddesden (under Edward the First) assigned to the royal touch a place midway between the polypharmacy of the physician and the craft of the surgeon-"a delicate provision," says Dr. Crawfurd, "for the contingency of the king's therapeutical impotence." As this passage is almost the only original suggestion in his "Rosa Anglica," we may guess that John, like the many persons who do not know that they are humorists, was naïvely unaware of his own scepticism. It is a happy biographical trait of Henry of Navarre that, at Ivry, on cutting down a man with his sabre, he exclaimed, “Je te touche, que Dieu te guérisse." But perhaps this says less for Henry's scepticism than Dr. Crawfurd thinks, characteristic of him as the story is. Even in the sixteenth century the stronger the creed the safer to jest with it; the Church has always tolerated the jester, while handing over the wrangler to the secular

arm.

The first great sceptic, to whose robust disdain of this item of his divinity the discredit of the touch is due, was William the Third. His sturdiness