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The many centuries of peasant unity, with its beauty of brotherhood, affection and communal interests, will come to an end under such a new regime. Already competitive forces are dissolving communism in land, and many of the old beauties of Russia are disappearing. Capitalism will bring with it much turmoil and strife, unhappiness and death, but also the dawn of brighter hours; newer and better cities, cleaner water, better food, houses and clothes, and after the stress of its first attack is over, and Russia has evolved laws and means to control and socialize the invader, it may be that the old simplicities and beauties of life will return, and a greater and holier Russia will arise, still able to teach and aid in the regeneration of the rest of the world.

The occasional use of the flag of a neutral or an enemy under the stress of immediate pursuit and to deceive an approaching enemy, which appears by the press reports to be represented as the precedent and justification used to support this action, seems to this Government a very different thing from an explicit sanction by a belligerent Government for its merchant ships generally to fly the flag of a neutral power within certain portions of the high seas which are presumed to be frequented with hostile warships. The formal declaration of such a policy of general misuse of a neutral's flag jeopardizes the vessels of the neutral visiting those waters in a peculiar degree by raising the presumption that they are of belligerent nationality regardless of the flag which they may carry.

It has already been suggested that the reigns of Richard and John form a period of transition to a new age. That period closes and the new age opens with the granting of the Great Charter and the attempted revolution which followed. The reign of John was the culmination of a long tendency in English history, most rapid since the accession of his father, towards the establishment of an absolutism in which the rights of all classes would disappear and the arbitrary will of the king be supreme. The story of his reign should reveal how very near that result was of accomplishment. A monarchy had been forming in the last three reigns, and very rapidly in the reign of John, capable of crushing any ordinary opposition, disregarding public opinion and traditional rights, possessing in the new judicial system, if regarded as an organ of the king's will alone, an engine of centralization, punishment, and extortion, of irresistible force, and developing rapidly in financial matters complete independence of all controlling principles. Though the barons were acting rather from personal and selfish motives, freedom for all classes depended on the speedy checking of this steady drift of two generations. The reigns of Richard and John may be called transitional because it is in them that the barons came to see clearly the principles on which successful resistance could be founded and the absolutist tendency checked. The embodiment of these principles in permanent form in the Great Charter to be accepted by the sovereign and enforced in practice, introduces an age, the age of constitutional growth, new in the history of England, and in the form and importance of its results new in the history of the world.

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