enveloped in a cloth, he heads a body of supporters prepared to back his champion for all, or more than all, they are worth. But the number of Nai Yim's following shows which breed is the favourite. Until this fight be decided, it is useless to start on the other pedestals: for, besides the two owners and a dozen of their followers, who squat around the jar with their noses glued to its transparent sides, there are four rows of bystanders betting recklessly. The stakes and the bets being duly recorded, and Nai Walab having made a mental calculation of his percentage as proprietor of the club, Nai Kem tilts his fish into the jar. With a flirt of his potent tail, he explores the larger limits of his new quarters, and then eyes the human faces through the glass with contemptuous unconcern. He is a portly little Green Fish, a thought too thick in the barrel for dexterous evolution, but armed with an array of teeth that would put a bull-terrier to shame. The flop of Nai Yim's fish is very disturbing to his nerves, and for a moment the two fly about the bowl concealed from each other by a cloud of bubbles. If fish had the sense of hearing more keenly developed, they would be still more perturbed by the shouts of their backers, inciting them to the fray. Nai Yim's warrior is dressed in Red: a lean, wiry little fish with a mighty spread of fin upon his back and a vast undulating keel along his belly. The water clears, and the gladiators are suddenly tooth to tooth in the middle. Their whole demeanour changes in a flash, and they sheer off, puffing out their gills, and erecting every fin-bone with wrath. Then the Red Fish shoots up alongside his big antagonist, and asks him what the devil he means. The Green Fish is grossly affronted, but will have no vulgar quarrel with an ill-bred bully in a public place. But he cannot shake the ruffian off; and, as they circle the bowl side by side, the Red Fish jostles his left fin, and throws him out of his stroke. It is a terrible provocation, but his dignity will not permit him to resent it; and he simply quickens his pace. The Red Fish has the inside of the turn, and quickens too, till he leads by half a head. This big Green coward, he thinks, shall be made to fight; so he deliberately fouls him, and drives him against the wall of the bowl. "Ten tikals on the Red Fish!" shriek Nai Yim's supporters. But the fat fellow is roused at last, and makes a side snap at his enemy's eye, and another at his open gill, fixing his teeth in the edge of the gill-shield. There is a struggle; and, as the Red Fish shakes himself free, two silver scales settle gently to the bottom. They are at it now hammer and tongs, flying round the bowl fin to fin, and snapping fiercely at each other's

eyes. Then the Red Fish drops an inch behind, and makes a grab at his opponent's fin. His teeth are deep in the fleshy joint, and the Green Fish spins round and round and round without dislodging them. His struggles grow weaker, and gradually the two sink lower in the bowl. The excitement in the gallery is deafening, and Nai Kem's supporters grin foolishly, and shout empty encouragement to their champion. Gradually the shouts die down, for the combatants are sulking at the bottom, and may remain there for half an hour. But the Red Fish cannot keep his grip for ever, and a sudden wrench of the fin tears it free. Nor, with his tired jaws, can he lay hold again, for the Green Fish turns suddenly, and comes at him open-jowled. They lock with a fury that shakes them stem to stern; and now the weight of the Green Fish begins to tell. He forces his antagonist helplessly against the glass, and, loosing him, digs his teeth into a dorsal fin. It is now Nai Kem's turn to cheer; for, twist and wriggle as he will, the little Red-Coat cannot wrench himself free. Then the fin tears; and, whole in valour if tattered in body, the Red Fish renews the attack. The sail he carried so proudly aloft when he went into action is a wreck, and its torn shreds drape his battered sides, and impede the working of his fins. But, like a game little privateer engaged by a big frigate, he asks no quarter, and only fights the more fiercely for his injuries. He has found out that the Green Fish is slow in turning; he remembers how dear such unwieldiness cost one of his dummy antagonists in the training jar. Open-mouthed, he hurls himself at his enemy's great broadside, and his chisel teeth snap to on a mouthful of scales behind the fin. In vain the Green Fish strives to turn, and bring his jaws to bear. He has drifted against the glass, helpless, and his enemy rams him again. A shower of scales goes settling to the bottom, and the wounds show white in his green ribs. He trics the surface, and the calm water is lashed into a tempest of ripples. In despair he plunges down to the narrow bottom, hoping perhaps to find some hole to shelter in till his hurts are healed. It was a fatal decision, and he knows it too late. Slantwise, like a lance, the Red Fish shoots down upon him, and holds him in the narrow foot of the jar. No rabbit driven by a ferret into the blind end of his burrow was ever so much at the mercy of his tormentor. The green tail is the first to suffer. It is all too tempting a tooth-hold in its wavy undulating curves. Its feathery, transparent edge is torn to ribbons, and then the Red Fish attacks the dorsal fin. With every furious backward tug the fabric gives; but still the poor fool clings to the bottom, rather than face the terrors above. Nai Yim and

his backers have shouted their voices away. The betting is ten tikals to one and no takers; and Nai Kem is softly aspersing the reputation of the Green Fish's female ancestors to the third generation: his fingers itching the while to drag his recreant champion into the open water, if only the rules allowed it.

But who shall passively allow himself to be dissected by ragged teeth? Naked of scales from quarter to rudder, the tortured Green makes a blind rush upward, and, as his tormentor makes a grab at his pectoral fin, he turns and grapples. It is a struggle of despair, and in the tempestuous broil the spectators cannot for a few minutes see which has the upper hand. Even Nai Kem takes heart to shout a war-cry: unaccompanied, however, by a bet. The combatants, fast locked, seem to be spinning in an aimless circle. Will they never break away? So terrific is the struggle that shouts die down to stifled ejaculations: the gallery catches its breath, and then a great shout of victory rends the summer air. For the straining bodies have risen to the surface; and a fountain of spray from the thrashing tails has splashed the first line of eager faces; when, with one supreme wrench, the Red Fish straightens himself like a bent spring, tears himself free, and lays a halting, zigzag course to the bottom of the bowl. In his teeth he carries much that does not belong to him; but he has had enough, and, if his enemy could even now flap a fin, and right himself in the water just for appearances, he might save his reputation and his owner's money. But he is past caring for fame. There he lies, careened over on his side with one torn fin-stump clear of the water, and a ragged tail drooping idly towards the bottom. He has fought his last fight, and he wants death

to take him quietly.

Tenderly Nai Yim lifts his game little champion with the bamboo spoon. He, too, has fought his last fight; but there are still seasons of honourable retirement and family life before him. His rigging hangs about him in a wreck that would excite derision but for the glory of it, and his teeth are blunted beyond repair. And, even so, his great heart is not daunted; for he bites savagely at Nai Yim's finger, as that proud sportsman restores him to his travelling jar, and takes him home to be the father of generations of warriors to come.

Væ Victis! The poor, battered corpse of the Green Fish is dishonoured in his most honourable death. Nai Kem, smothering an execration as he unties the amount of his lost wager from the corner of his parnung, slings him to the dogs, still feebly waving a fin-stump.

BASIL THOMSON.

E

IMPERIALISM

III

VEN at its lowest ebb Imperialism never wanted advocates. With Dismemberment rife in official circles, and the Classes given over to fetish worship, there yet remained "seven thousand, all the knees, which had not bent to Baal." To them England owes hardly less than to her intrepid Colonial sons; for it is yet more difficult to hold an Empire together than to build it up, and it was on these, supported by the loyalty of the Britains oversea, that the brunt of the battle fell. For years they laboured, as it seemed in vain: the sound of their voice was drowned by the clamour of contending factions and the triumphing sectaries of Free Trade. But they were not disheartened. Those same qualities, which were widening the frontiers of the Empire on three Continents, they employed in the humbler task of keeping alive the Imperial spirit in these Realms. With a patient courage, almost heroic, they struggled against stupidity, ignorance, error, and treason. For a quarter of a century they preached to deaf ears. They had to bear the scorn of their enemies, and the pity of their friends. Their Colonial brethren were cheered by success, and stimulated by the atmosphere, electrical with possibilities of new and vigorous communities: they were sustained by the strength of their own conviction only. Such men are the glory of England, and, happily for her, she has always been able to command their services at critical periods in her history-the secret, perhaps, of her moral preeminence. The story of Sodom, as told in the Bible, may be a myth, but the main facts are as old as civilisation itself. And so the national conscience has never been so dead in England that it has not been awakened in time to avert national retribution.

Like most great movements in their infancy, Imperialism knew no class, party, or creed. In its ranks were to be found representatives of every social order and every shade of opinion-all animated by the same disinterested motive, and all conscious that they were devoting their

best energies to an unpopular cause. But it was not for the present they worked, but for the future: a distinction they share with the greatest statesmen on the roll of fame. It takes a rare combination of qualities to sow seed that remote posterity may reap, and no political or religious movement has ever been originated without it. But if, as in the Empire at large, the strength of Imperialism lay in the rank and file, its power of generating sympathy in the hearts of the great mass of the people was to be found in its leaders. First, among those who are no longer with us, was Carlyle, its earliest and greatest prophet; was Tennyson, who sang of it in stately measures, recalling England to forgotten duty, and rebuking the craven-spirited children of Mammon by his own exalted patriotism; was Beaconsfield, its inspiration and creative genius up to the present hour; was Forster, the founder of the Federation League; were Lord Carnarvon, the seventh Duke of Manchester, Judge Haliburton, and Mr. Edward Jenkins. Of living statesmen Lord Salisbury and Lord Rosebery are by far the most distinguished: two loyal adherents, whose length of service and whose intellectual weight mark them out from the train of renegades and time-servers, who would fain push them aside. For every politician is an Imperialist now, cr says he is, and with fervour most intense when the cant of Little Englandism has hardly died away on his lips. The growth of AngloSaxon unity has given us many surprises, but none so ironical as the evolution of the Radical, professing "the eternal principles of Liberalism, into the full-blown Imperialist. As a political force Democracy may be sadly defective, but there can be no doubt that it has thoroughly mastered the secret of bending its so-called chiefs to its will. In the pursuit of a noble object, as in the case of Imperialism, this is well. But it reflects little credit on either party in the State that Lord George Hamilton, alone of the statesmen sitting on the Government and Opposition benches, should have been identified with Imperialism in the early Seventies. About the same time it enlisted the services of Mr. Froude, Sir John Seeley, Sir H. Drummond Wolff, Sir John Colomb, the Earl of Harrowby, then Viscount Sandon, and Lord, then Mr., Brassey. Of its progress since '84 there is no need to speak. The movement, which in '69 was so feeble that its only leaders, capable of initiative, were three unknown Colonials, now attracts to its ranks the very flower of the intellect, wealth, and aristocracy of the country. Such is the difference between popularity and unpopularity. But, with this enormous access of influence, Imperialism is less familiar with men Vol. XVII.-No. 103. 3 B