Amelia Edith Barr - "A Daughter of Fife"

Henry Beam Piper - "A Slave is a Slave"

Cyrus Townsend Brady - "The Eagle of the Empire"

Harriet S. Caswell - "Stories and Sketches"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

First and Last

H >> H. Belloc >> First and Last




The forces at the centre, which he commanded in person, deftly withdrew
before the futile gallop of William's cavalry, leaving, with that
coolness which has ever distinguished our troops, the laggards to their
fate. At the same moment, and with marvellous precision, the left and
right were withdrawn from the plateau rapidly and as by magic, and the
old-fashioned tactics of mere impact (which William of Normandy seems
seriously to have relied on!) were spent and wasted upon the now
evacuated summit of the hill.

What followed is famous in history.

The cohesion of the Saxon force and the exactitude and coolness with
which its great operation was performed is of good augury for the future
of our country. Though it was now thick night, by no set road and with
no cumbersome machinery of train and rear-guard, the whole of the vast
assembly masked itself behind the woodlands of the Weald.

The Norman horsemen, bewildered and fatigued, gazed on the many that had
fallen in defence of the masking position and wondered whether such
novel happenings were victory or no, but the army whose concentration
upon the Thames it was William's whole object to prevent, was already
miles northward, each unit proceeding by exactly co-ordinated routes
towards London.

There is perhaps no more difficult task set before soldiers than the
quiet execution of such a manoeuvre after the heat of a heavy action,
and none have performed it more magnificently than the veteran troop of
Harold.

When (luckily) all the orders had been finally distributed a great
tragedy marred the completeness of the day.

Just before the execution of this masterpiece of strategy, and as the
autumn sun was sinking, the inevitable price which war demands of all
its darlings was paid.

Harold himself, the artist of the great victory, fell. But we have no
reason to believe that his loss retarded the retrograding movement in
any degree. Men who create as Harold created have not their creations
spoilt by death.

* * * * *

The shameful history of the close of the campaign is familiar to every
schoolboy, and the military historian must be pardoned if he deals with
a purely civilian blunder in a few brief words.

Parliament interfered--as it always does--with what should have been a
matter for soldiers alone. Intrigues, bribery, or worse (with which the
military historian has no concern) ruined what had been, in the field,
one of the principal achievements of the Saxon arms. And William, who
could not count to hold his own against regular forces and who was
astonished to find himself free to retreat precipitately on Dover, was
still more astonished to find himself accepted a few weeks later after
an aimless march to the west and north by the politicians--or worse--at
Berkhampstead. He and England were equally astounded to find that a
broken and defeated invader could actually be accepted by the intriguers
at Westminster and crowned King of England as the price of a secret
bargain.

Such was the fruit of as great and successful an effort as ever Saxon
soldier made: the Battle of Senlac: for such--as I am now free to
reveal--was the true name of the field of action.

The ineptitude or avarice of politicians had undone the work of
soldiers, and it is no wonder that the last of Harold's veterans, who
retired in disgust to impregnable fortresses in Ely, Arthur's Seat, and
Pudsey, are recorded to have gnashed their teeth and shed tears of
indignation at the dispatches from the metropolis. At Crecy they were to
be avenged.




The Roman Roads in Picardy


If a man were asked where he would find upon the map the sharpest
impress of Rome and of the memories of Rome, and where he would most
easily discover in a few days on foot the foundations upon which our
civilization still rests, he might, in proportion to his knowledge of
history and of Europe, be puzzled to reply. He might say that a week
along the wall from Tyne to Solway would be the answer; or a week in the
great Roman cities of Provence with their triumphal arches and their
vast arenas and their Roman stone cropping out everywhere: in old quays,
in ruined bridges, in the very pavement of the streets they use to-day,
and in the columns of their living churches.

Now I was surprised to find myself after many years of dabbling in such
things, furnishing myself the answer in quite a different place. It was
in Picardy during the late manoeuvres of the French Army that, in the
intervals of watching those great buzzing flies, the aeroplanes, and in
the intervals of long tramps after the regiments or of watching the
massed guns, the necessity for perpetually consulting the map brought
home to me for the first time this truth--that Picardy is the
province--or to be more accurate, Picardy with its marches in the Ile de
France, the edge of Normandy and the edge of Flanders--which retains
to-day the most vivid impress of Rome. For though the great buildings
are lacking, and the Roman work, which must here have been mainly of
brick, has crumbled, and though I can remember nothing upstanding and
patently of the Empire between the gate of Rheims and the frontier of
Artois, yet one feature--the Roman road--is here so evident, so
multiple, and so enduring that it makes up for all the rest.

One discovers the old roads upon the map, one after the other, with a
sort of surprise. The scheme develops before one as one looks, and
always when one thinks one has completed the web another and yet another
straight arrow of a line reveals itself across the page.

The map is a sort of palimpsest. A mass of fine modern roads, a whole
red blur of lanes and local ways, the big, rare black lines of the
railway--these are the recent writing, as it were; but underneath the
whole, more and more apparent and in greater and greater numbers as one
learns to discover them, are the strict, taut lines which Rome stretched
over all those plains.

There is something most fascinating in noting them, and discovering them
one after the other.

For they need discovering. No one of them is still in complete use. The
greater part must be pieced together from lengths of lanes which turn
into broad roads, and then suddenly sink again into footpaths, rights of
way, or green forest rides.

Often, as with our rarer Roman roads in England, all trace of the thing
disappears under the plough or in the soft crossings of the river
valleys; one marks them by the straightness of their alignment, by the
place names which lie upon them (the repeated name Estree, for instance,
which is like the place name "street" upon the Roman roads of England);
by the recovery of them after a gap; by the discoveries which local
archaeology has made.

Different men have different pastimes, and I dare say that most of those
who read this will wonder that such a search should be a pastime for any
man, but I confess it is a pastime for me. To discover these things, to
recreate them, to dig out on foot the base upon which two thousand years
of history repose, is the most fascinating kind of travel.

And then, the number of them! You may take an oblong of country with
Maubeuge at one corner, Pontoise at another, Yvetot and some frontier
town such as Fumes for the other two corners, and in that stretch of
country a hundred and fifty miles by perhaps two hundred, you can build
up a scheme of Roman ways almost as complete as the scheme of the great
roads to-day.

That one which most immediately strikes the eye is the great line which
darts upon Rouen from Paris.

Twice broken at the crossing of the river valleys, and lost altogether
in the last twelve miles before the capital of Normandy, it still stands
on the modern map a great modern road with every aspect of purpose and
of intention in its going.

From Amiens again they radiate out, these roads, some, like the way to
Cambray, in use every mile; some, like the old marching road to the sea,
to the Portus Itius, to Boulogne, a mere lane often wholly lost and
never used as a great modern road. This was the way along which the
French feudal cavalry trailed to the disaster of Crecy, and just beyond
Crecy it goes and loses itself in that exasperating but fascinating
manner which is the whole charm of Roman roads wherever the hunter finds
them. You may lay a ruler along this old forgotten track, all the way
past Domqueur, Novelle (which is called Novelle-en-Chaussee, that is
Novelle on the paved road), on past Estree (where from the height you
overlook the battlefield of Crecy), and that ruler so lying on your map
points right at Boulogne Harbour, thirty odd miles away--and in all
those thirty odd remaining miles I could not find another yard of it.
But what an interest! What a hobby to develop! There is nothing like it
in all the kinds of hunting that have ever been invented for filling up
the whole of the mind. True, you will get no sauce of danger, but, on
the other hand, you will hunt for weeks and weeks, and you will come
back year after year and go on with your hunting, and sometimes you
actually find--which is more than can be said for hunting some animals
in the Weald.

How was it lost, this great main road of Europe, this marching road of
the legions, linking up Gaul and Britain, the way that Hadrian went, and
the way down which the usurper Constantine III must have come during
that short adventure of his which lends such a romance to the end of the
Empire? One cannot conceive why it should have disappeared. It is a
sunken way down the hillside across the light railway which serves
Crecy, it gets vaguer and vaguer, for all the world like those ridges
upon the chalk that mark the Roman roads in England, and then it is
gone. It leaves you pointing, I say, at that distant harbour, thirty odd
miles off, but over all those miles it has vanished. The ghost of the
legends cannot march along it any more. In one place you find a few
yards of it about three miles south and east of Montreuil. It may be
that the little lane leading into Estree shows where it crossed the
valley of the Cauche, but it is all guesswork, and therefore very proper
to the huntsman.

Then there is that unbroken line by which St. Martin came, I think, when
he rode into Amiens, and at the gate of the town cut his cloak in two to
cover the beggar. It drives across country for Roye and on to Noyon, the
old centre of the Kings. It is a great modern road all the way, and it
stretches before you mile after mile after mile, until suddenly, without
explanation and for no reason, it ends sharply, like the life of a man.
It ends on the slopes of the hill called Choisy, at the edge of the wood
which is there. And seek as you will, you will never find it again.

From that road also, near Amiens, branches out another, whose object was
St. Quentin, first as a great high road, lost in the valley of the
Somme, a lesser road again, still in one strict alignment, it reaches on
to within a mile of Vermand, and there it stops dead. I do not think
that between Vermand and St. Quentin you will find it. Go out
north-westward from Vermand and walk perhaps five miles, or seven: there
is no trace of a road, only the rare country lanes winding in and out,
and the open plough of the rolling land. But continue by your compass so
and you will come (suddenly again and with no apparent reason for its
abrupt origin) upon the dead straight line that ran from the capital of
the Nervii, three days' march and more, and pointing all the time
straight at Vermand.

And so it is throughout the province and its neighbourhood. Here and
there, as at Bavai, a great capital has decayed. Here and there (but
more rarely), a town wholly new has sprung up since the Romans, but the
plan of the country is the same as that which they laid down, and the
roads as you discover them, mark it out and establish it. The armies
that you see marching to-day in their manoeuvres follow for half a
morning the line which was taken by the Legions.




The Reward of Letters


It has often been remarked that while all countries in the world possess
some sort of literature, as Iceland her Sagas, England her daily papers,
France her prose writers and dramatists, and even Prussia her railway
guides, one nation and one alone, the Empire of Monomotopa, is utterly
innocent of this embellishment or frill.

No traveller records the existence of any Monomotopan quill-driver; no
modern visitor to that delightful island has come across a
_litterateur_ whether in the worse or in the best hotels; and such
reading as the inhabitants enjoy is entirely confined to works imported
by large steamers from the neighbouring Antarctic Continent.

The causes of this singular and happy state of affairs were unknown
(since the common histories did not mention them) until the recent
discovery by Mr. Paley, the chief authority upon Monomotopan hieratic
script, of a very ancient inscription which clearly sets forth the whole
business.

It seems that an Emperor of Monomotopa, whose date can be accurately
fixed by internal evidence to lie after the universal deluge and before
the building of the Pyramid of Cheops, was, upon his accession to the
throne, particularly concerned with the just repartition of taxes among
his beloved subjects.

It would seem (if we are to trust the inscription) that in a past still
more remote the taxes were so light that even the richest men would meet
them promptly and without complaining, but this was at a period when the
enemies of Monomotopa were at once distant and actively engaged in
quarrelling among themselves. With sickening treachery these distant
rival nations had determined to produce wealth and to live in amity, so
that it was incumbent upon the Monomotopans not only to build ships, but
actually to provide an army, and at last (what broke the camel's back)
to establish fortifications of a very useless but expensive sort upon a
dozen points of their Imperial coast.

Under the increasing strain the old fiscal system broke down. The poor
were clearly embarrassed, as might be seen in their emaciated visages
and from the terrible condition of their boots. The rich had reached the
point after which it was inconvenient to them to pay any more. The
middle classes were spending the greater part of their time in devising
methods by which the exorbitant and intempestive demands of the
collectors could be either evaded or, more rarely, complied with. In a
word, a new and juster system of taxation was an imperative need, and
the Emperor, who had just ascended the throne at the age of eighteen,
and whom a sort of greenness had preserved from the iniquities of this
world, was determined to effect the great reform.

With the advice of his Ministers (all of whom had had considerable
experience in the handling of money), the Emperor at last determined
that each man and woman should pay to the State one-tenth and no more of
the wealth which he or she produced; those who produced nothing it was
but common justice and reason to exempt, and the effect of this tardy
act of justice upon the very rich was observed in the sudden increase of
the death-rate from all those diseases that are the peculiar product of
luxury and evil living. Paupers also, the unemployed, cripples,
imbeciles, deaf mutes, and the clergy escaped under this beneficent and
equable statute, and we may sum up the whole policy by saying that never
was a law acclaimed with so much happy bewilderment nor subject to less
expressed criticism than this.

It was, moreover, easy to estimate in this new fashion the total revenue
of the State, since its produce had been accurately set down by
statisticians of the utmost eminence, and one of these diverse documents
had been taken for the basis of the new fiscal regime.

In practice also the collection was easy. Overseers would attend the
harvest with large carts, prong the tenth turnip, hoick up the tenth
sheaf of wheat, bucket out the tenth gallon of ale, and so forth. In the
markets every tenth animal was removed by Imperial officers, every tenth
newspaper was impounded as it left the press, and every tenth drink
about to be consumed in the hostelries of the Empire was, after a
simulacrum of proffering it, suddenly removed by the waiter and poured
into a receptacle, the keys of which were very jealously guarded.

It was the same with the liberal professions: of the fee received by a
barrister in the Criminal Courts a tenth was regularly demanded at the
door when the verdict had been given and the prisoner whom he had
defended passed out to execution. The tenth knock-out in the prize ring
received by the professional pugilist was followed by the immediate
sequestration of his fee for that particular encounter, and the tenth
aria vibrating from the lips of a prima donna was either compounded for
at a certain rate or taken in kind by the official who attended at every
performance of grand opera.

One form of wealth alone puzzled the beneficent monarch and his
Napoleonic advisers, and this was the production (for it then existed)
of literary matter.

At first this seemed as simple to tax as any one of the other numerous
activities upon which the Emperor's loyal and loving subjects were
engaged. A brief examination of the customs of the trade, conducted by
an army of officials who penetrated into the very dens and attics in
which Letters are evolved, reported that the method of payment was by
the measurement of a number of words.

"It is, your Majesty," wrote the permanent official of the department in
his minute, "the practice of those who charitably employ this sort of
person to pay them in classes by the thousand words; thus one man gets
one sequin a thousand, another two byzants, a third as much as a ducat,
while some who have singularly attracted the notice of the public can
command ten, twenty, nay forty scutcheons, and in some very exceptional
cases a thousand words command one of those beautiful pieces of stiff
paper which your Majesty in his bountiful provision tenders to his
dutiful subjects for acceptance as metal under diverse penalties. The
just taxation of these fellows can therefore be easily achieved if your
Majesty, in the exercise of his almost superhuman wisdom, will but add a
schedule to the Finance Act in which there shall be set down fifteen or
twenty classes of writers, with their price per thousand words, and a
compulsory registration of each class, enforced by the rude hand of the
police."

The Emperor of Monomotopa immediately nominated a Royal Commission
(unpaid), among whose sons, nephews, and private friends the salaried
posts connected with the work were distributed. This Commission reported
by a majority of one ere two years had elapsed. The schedule was
designed, and such _litterateurs_ as had not in the interval fled
the country were registered, while a further enactment strictly
forbidding their employers to make payment upon any other system
completed the scheme.

But, alas! so full of low cunning and dirty dodges is this kind of man
(I mean what we call authors) that very soon after the promulgation of
the new law a marked deterioration in the quality of Monomotopan letters
was apparent upon every side!

The citizen opening his morning paper would be astonished to find the
leading article consist of nothing more original than a portion of the
sacred Scriptures. A novel bought to ease the tedium of a journey would
consist of long catalogues for the most part, and when it came to
descriptions of scenery would fall into the most minute and detailed
category of every conceivable feature of the landscape. Some even took
advantage of the new regulation so far as to repeat one single word an
interminable number of times, while it was remarked with shame by the
Ministers of Religion that the morals of their literary friends
permitted them only to use words of one syllable, and those of the
shortest kind. And this they said was the only true and original
Monomotopan dialect.

Such was the public inconvenience that next year a sharper and much more
drastic law was passed, by which it was laid down that every literary
composition should make sense within the meaning of the Act, and should
be original so far as the reading of the judge appointed for the trial
of the case extended. But though after the first few executions this law
was generally observed, the nasty fellows affected by it managed to
evade it in spirit, for by the use of obscure terms, of words drawn from
dead languages, and of bold metaphor transferred from one art to
another, they would deliberately invite prosecution, and then in the
witness-box make fools of those plain men, the judge and jury, by
showing that this apparently meaningless claptrap could, with sufficient
ingenuity, be made to yield some sort of sense, and during this period
no art critic was put to death.

Driven to desperation, the Emperor changed the whole basis of the
Remuneration of Literary Labour, and ordered that it should be by the
length of the prose or poetry measured in inches.

This reform, however, did but add to the confusion, for while the men of
the pen wrote their works entirely in short dialogue, asterisks, and
blanks, the publishers, who were now thoroughly organized, printed the
same in smaller and smaller type, in order to avoid the consequences of
the law.

At this last piece of insolence the Emperor's mind was quickly decided.
Arresting one night not only all those who had ever written, but all
those who had even boasted of letters, or who were so much as suspected
by their relatives of secretly indulging in them, he turned the whole
two million into a large but enclosed area, and (desiring to kill two
birds with one stone) offered the ensuing spectacle as an amusement to
the more sober and respectable sections of the community.

It is well known that the profession of letters breeds in its followers
an undying hatred of each against his fellows. The public were therefore
entertained for a whole day with the pleasing sight of a violent but
quite disordered battle, in which each of the wretched prisoners seemed
animated by no desire but the destruction of as many as possible of his
hated rivals, until at last every soul of these detestable creatures had
left its puny body and the State was rid of all.

A law which carried to the universities the rule of the primary
schools--to wit, that men should be taught to read but not to
write--completed the good work. And there was peace.




The Eye-Openers


Without any doubt whatsoever, the one characteristic of the towns is
the lack of reality in the impressions of the many: now we live in
towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It isn't only that we get
our impressions for the most part as imaginary pictures called up by
printer's ink--that would be bad enough; but by some curious perversion
of the modern mind, printer's ink ends by actually preventing one from
seeing things that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another
who has not travelled, "Travel!" one wonders whether, after all, if he
does travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he will
find a new world; and there is more to be discovered in this fashion
to-day than ever there was.

I have sometimes wished that every Anglo-Saxon who from these shores has
sailed and seen for the first time the other Anglo-Saxons in New York or
Melbourne, would write in quite a short letter what he really felt.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred men only write what they have read
before they started, just as Rousseau in an eighteenth-century village
believed that every English yokel could vote and that his vote conveyed
a high initiative, making and unmaking the policy of the State; or just
as people, hearing that the birth-rate of France is low, travel in that
country and say they can see no children--though they would hardly say
it about Sussex or Cumberland where the birth-rate is lower still.

What travel does in the way of pleasure (the providing of new and fresh
sensations, and the expansion of experience), that it ought to do in the
way of knowledge. It ought to and it does, with the wise, provide a
complete course of unlearning the wretched tags with which the sham
culture of our great towns has filled us. For instance, of Barbary--the
lions do not live in deserts; they live in woods. The peasants of
Barbary are not Semitic in appearance or in character; Barbary is full
to the eye, not of Arab and Oriental buildings--they are not
striking--but of great Roman monuments: they are altogether the most
important things in the place. Barbary is not hot, as a whole: most of
Barbary is extremely cold between November and March. The inhabitants of
Barbary do not like a wild life, they are extremely fond of what
civilization can give them, such as _creme de menthe_, rifles, good
waterworks, maps, and railways: only they would like to have these
things without the bother of strict laws and of the police, and so
forth. Travel in Barbary with seeing eyes and you find out all this new
truth.

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