THE SILLY ASS

BY JAMES BARNES

ILLUSTRATION BY ARTHUR COVEY

"Marcia," called the admiral, tapping lightly on the state-room door with the back of his fingernails, "Marcia, my dear, I hope you're better. Come out with me; it's—oh, ah—where's Miss Marcia?"

The door had been opened by the courier maid, whose wilted and forlorn appearance was eloquent of her failure to live up to at least one item in her letter of recommendation.

"Miss Dorn has gone up to—ze deck, Monsieur."

"Humph! I didn't see her. When did she go?"

"Since early zis morning, Monsieur," rejoined the well-recommended one rather despondently.

Perhaps she might have gone on to say something more, but the admiral stamped down the passageway. The maid looked on her features in the glass much as one might inspect a barometer, drew a weak, despairing breath, and laid herself down on the sofa again, her relaxed person responding inertly to the steamer's vibrations.

Now, Admiral Page Paulding was as sweet-tempered an old sea-dog as ever retired from the employ of an ungrateful country; but foggy weather always worked a bit on his nerves—and what hands he had held that morning in the smoke-room! As he thumped up the rubber-carpeted staircase he knew that he was in a thoroughly bad humor, but made up his mind to conceal it. And there were reasons. When a man has reached the age when by all rights he should be a grandfather, and finds himself only a foolish old-bachelor uncle personally conducting a young niece of marriageable age and attractive exterior on her first trip to Europe, it may well be said: "Of each day learneth he experience." Aside from the avuncular privilege of paying bills, he had known the jealous promptings of a father, indulged in the self-communing suspicions of a mother, and supported smilingly the irritations of a chaperon. The enforced companionship of a courier maid does not lessen the perplexities of certain situations nor lighten the burden of responsibility.

If the truth be told, the admiral's retirement, this time, from what might quite properly be termed active service would be accompanied by no bitter heartburnings and regrets. Rather—yes, many times rather—would he con a fleet of battle-ships through the tortuous turnings of Smith Island Sound than again personally conduct one attractive and impulsive young female through the hotel-strewn shoals of Europe. There was that German baron in Switzerland, that dashing young lieutenant of cavalry in Vienna, and that persistent Englishman—oh, that persistent Englishman!—who turned up everywhere, and would not be turned down! There was a good deal back of the cablegram the old gentleman had sent Mrs. Dorn, his sister, from Southampton, which had read:

Sailing Caronia, unentangled, on Wednesday.

"That means only three days more now," mused the admiral, recalling these words to himself as he came out on the promenade-deck. He stood there a moment, looking about him, hoping for a glimpse of a slim young figure. But no sign! His conscience smote him a little. Maybe he had been somewhat neglectful for the past two days; but then—All at once he noticed the remarkable change in the weather.

From a foggy, dreary morning it had grown into a crisp, sparkling afternoon. The long, sweeping seas, the aftermath of some heavy blow to the northward, had subsided. Passengers who had kept to their cabins, or who had huddled in the corners of saloon or library, were emerging on the decks. Those who had braved the weather rather than face the close air below looked up, mummy-wise, from their swathings with hopes of returning appetites.

It had needed but a short perusal of the passenger-list to show him that his niece and he had several acquaintances as fellow-travelers on this homeward and thrice welcome voyage. One of the swaddled objects suddenly turned and addressed him:

"Looking for Miss Dorn, Admiral?"

"Oh, how d'ye do—Mrs. ——" For the life of him, he couldn't remember the lady's name. "Lovely day—er, yes; have you seen Marcia anywhere?"

"Yes; she's been walking up and down here for an hour with Victor Masterson and my——"

"With—what did you say his name was?"

"Victor Masterson."

"Is he an Englishman?"

"Oh, no; very much of an American, I should say—oh, most amusing and entertaining. My daughter has met him somewhere. I think you will find the young people up in that direction, playing some game or other."

The admiral thanked the swaddled lady and strode forward impatiently. All at once he stopped.

"I wonder," said he to himself, "if that's the silly ass I squelched t'other day in the smoke-room; just like Marcia to have picked him out!"

* * * * *

In the sunniest corner of the promenade-deck a quartermaster had laid the numbered squares of a shuffleboard. The game was over, but two young people still lingered, leaning against the rail. One was a tall, slender girl with red lips, red cheeks, tan-colored hair, and tan shoes, and the other was a very slight, extremely round-faced young man whose attire and manners could best be described as "insistent." He was one of the kind that appears in all weathers without a hat and that persists in attracting attention to large feet and bony ankles by wearing turned-up trousers, low shoes, and vivid half-hose. At this moment he was enjoying himself, and so was the girl.

"Was he large and rather red-faced?" she asked, following up something her companion was saying.

"Yes, with two bunches of iron-gray spinach growing down like this; and he beckoned me over to him and said, 'Young man, you're playing the clown'; and I said, 'You play you're the elephant, and we'll be a circus.'"

The round-faced one te-heed in a way that was contagious; Miss Dorn quite loved him for it.

"Do that again," she said.

"Do what?"

"Make that little squeak."

He looked at her with mock seriousness. "Oh, please don't! Please don't!" He spoke imploringly. "I am very touchy about my laugh—it's the only one I've got, you know. It's quite childish, isn't it? Never grew up, you know." He made the funny little sound again. It was like the bleating of a toy lamb when its head is twisted. "You know, they ask me how I do it. I don't know; I try to teach other people—they never seem to get it right. Do you like it?"

Miss Dorn laughed again and looked gratefully at him.

"Oh, I'm so glad I met you!" she said quite frankly—and then, mischievously: "I'll ask my uncle to forgive you, if you like."

"Your uncle!"

"Yes, the old gentleman with the—er—spinach."

If Mr. Masterson was simulating embarrassment, he did it very cleverly: he started to say something once or twice, changed his mind confusedly, and suddenly, putting the shuffleboard stick under his arm, began to imitate a guitar.

Miss Dorn applauded. "Splendid! You should play in the orchestra."

"Thank you." He smiled gratefully. "Listen; this is a bassoon. I have to make a funny face when I do it."

Miss Dorn clapped her hands. "Great!" she cried. "Oh, simply great!"

"A flute," introduced Mr. Masterson.

Miss Marcia chortled. "That's a funnier face than the last," she said.

"A cello."

"Good!"

"A violin," he announced.

"Not so good"; she smiled in appreciative criticism.

"I'll have to practise up on it. But listen to this. I'm all right on the cornet."

It did sound like a cornet, even to the tremolo and the tonguing. People were looking up from their steamer-chairs now, and one or two pedestrians had gathered about; Mr. Masterson had an appreciative audience. Encouraged, he essayed another effort. He wrinkled his comical face and pursed up his lips, starting three or four times, and shaking his head at his failures. The others were watching him much as they would a catherine-wheel that refused to ignite. At last he brought forth a puny little sound.

"I really don't know," observed the amateur entertainer blandly, "what that is."

Every one burst into roars, and it was at this moment that the Admiral hove in sight round the corner of the deck-house. When Miss Dorn looked up, Mr. Masterson was gone; the crowd, still laughing, was dwindling; and there stood her uncle. He had on what she termed his "quarter-deck expression." Before he could speak she had taken him by the arm.



"Where have you been, Nuncky dear?" she inquired most sweetly.

"Looking for you, my dear Marcia."

"For two whole days?"

"Well—er—yesterday I—er—thought you'd better be left alone, and—er—where did you meet that young man?"

"Oh, Bertha Sands introduced him—he's a dear! You came just a minute too late." Miss Dorn laughed and squeezed her uncle's arm. "He's so amusing. You'd love to meet him!"

"That silly ass!" grunted Admiral Paulding. "Not much. He makes my toe itch! I've got a good name for him—'the smoke-room pest.' He's always doing card tricks under your unwilling nose, pretending to sit on somebody's hat, upsetting the dominos! If he can get a laugh out of a waiter, he's perfectly satisfied. I squelched him the other day, I can tell you!"

"What did you do?" Miss Marcia asked the question with mock seriousness.

"Never mind; but I taught him a lesson. Marcia, my dear, you do pick up the most peculiar acquaintances."

"But, really, my dear Nuncky, he's so clever, so quick at repartee—m—m—I'd be afraid! Tell me how you did it."

"Never mind how; but let me tell you this! That young man would never say anything sensible if he could help it, and never do anything useful, even by accident! And I think that you, my dear Marcia——"

"It's been a perfectly lovely day," remarked Miss Dorn abstractedly.

II

As if in sheer perversity, the weather changed early in the evening, and the night that followed was punctuated regularly by the blast of the fog-whistle. The next day broke thick and damp, with a wall of impenetrable mist shadowing the great vessel to half her length. Over the tall sides the greasy green of the water could just be seen moving by. The masts and funnels disappeared irregularly overhead. The fog clung to everything; it rimed the rugs and capes of the passengers who feared the close air of the 'tween-decks and lay recumbent in the steamer-chairs, and it clung in little pearls to Miss Marcia Dorn's curly front hair, that seemed to curl all the tighter for the wetting.

With Mr. Victor Masterson at her side, she was walking up and down the hurricane-deck. His appearance was not quite so spruce or so comical this morning; he looked as if he had been dipped overboard. He still disdained a hat, and his hair was plastered over his forehead in an uneven, scraggly bang. The weather seemed also to have dampened his spirits. Miss Dorn found it difficult to lead him away from serious subjects; his ideas on mental telepathy did not amuse her, nor the fact that he was a fatalist.

"Oh, I wish you'd do something to make me laugh," she broke in suddenly.

"Are you ticklish?" inquired the Silly Ass quite soberly.

Miss Dorn could not help but titter; she was not at all put out.

"There!" said Mr. Masterson. "Now, you see, I have done it! Please thank me. Now let me go on. You know, there is no doubt that the mind of one person when thinking of——"

"Oh, don't let's think!" Miss Dorn leaned back against the rail, half hidden from the gangway. "Isn't it dreary," she said, "this weather? And look at those people all stretched out. I wish we could do something to wake them up! The whole ship seems to have the glooms—even the captain; he wouldn't speak a word to me at breakfast."

"I could wake 'em up," said Mr. Masterson emphatically. "I could wake the whole ship up, and the captain too, and the lootenant, and the quartermaster, and the squingerneer, and the crew of the Nancy Brig, if I wanted to—and your Uncle Admiral Elephant here, asleep in the steamer-chair."

"Why, sure enough, there he is!" cried Miss Dorn. "He's got the glooms, too; he says he always gets 'em in foggy weather at sea." She turned and touched Mr. Masterson lightly on the arm. "Wake him up!" she said, her eyes twinkling.

"I hardly dare."

"Oh, go on! I don't believe you can. How would you do it?"

"How would I do it? Why, just this way." He crumpled his hands together and blew between the knuckles of his thumbs a low, resonant, gruffly humming note.

They were hidden now by the bow of the life-boat and were standing quite close together. They noticed that the figure in the steamer-chair nearest them had suddenly raised itself a little and then had sat bolt upright. The old admiral, the mist in his gray whiskers, turned one ear forward and listened attentively.

The gray wall had grown a little whiter, less opaque; they could see now the whole length of the ship, out to the lifting stern.

"Oh, go on," tempted the girl; "do it again—louder!"

Mr. Masterson looked at her.

"Oh, please do," she pleaded; "real loud. I dare you to!"

He slowly raised his hands, the thumb-knuckles to his lips again. There sounded two deep, long-drawn, half-roaring, thrilling notes, for all the world like steam in the cup of a great metal whistle.

Footsteps, hurried and quick, rushed overhead on the bridge. A hoarse voice shouted orders. The quartermaster spun the wheel. Now:

"Full speed ahead, the starboard engine! Full speed astern, port!"

"Ay, ay, sir!"

There was the clank-clank of the semaphores, and suddenly two bursting, answering blasts that hid the huge funnels in a cloud of feathery white.

The admiral in the steamer-chair threw off his wrappings and leaped to the rail.

A loud, anxious hail from above: "Lookout, there forward! Can you make out anything?"

"Oh, see what I've done!" faltered the Silly Ass in a frightened whisper.

Miss Dorn grasped his shoulder.

There had followed a sudden cry that rose in a diapason of mad fear:

"Vessel ahead! Starboard your helm, sir! Starboard your h-e-l-m!"

The helm was already over; the ship was swinging wide. Another quick order. The second officer leaped again to the semaphores. The huge fabric trembled, racking in every plate, as both engines reversed at full speed, the screws churning and thundering astern. And now a rift came in the encircling fog, as if it had been cut by a mighty sword.

Clear and distinct, not half a cable's length away, wallowed a great black shape. The mighty bow swept veering past her quarter, then her stern, and clear of it by no more than thirty yards!

Only those few on deck outside of the weather-cloth saw the sight, and then for but an instant. Never would they forget it!

Lying low in the water, all awash from the break of her topgallant-forecastle to the lift of her high poop-deck, the green seas running under her bridge and about her superstructure, swayed a great mass of iron and steel of full five thousand tons! Ship without a soul! A wisp of a flag, upside down, still floated in her slackened rigging; swinging falls dangled from her empty davits. Then the fog closed in, and, as a picture on a lantern-slide fades and disappears, she vanished and was gone!

A white-faced boy looked up into Miss Dorn's frightened eyes. His lips moved, but made no sound.

On the bridge, the captain had grasped the second officer by the arm. "My God! Fitzgerald, did you see that? It was the Drachenburg."

"Derelict and abandoned! But, by heaven, sir, she signaled us!"

The captain turned quickly. "Stop those engines!" he ordered hoarsely.

The tearing pulses down below ceased their beating; it was as if a great heart had stopped! The ship, breathless at her own escape, lay calm and quiet in the fog. The only sound was of the greasy waves lapping her high steel flanks. Yet——

Admiral Dorn, still standing beneath the bridge, with both hands grasping the rail, shivered and drew breath. What might have happened if——He looked forward. He imagined he could hear the crash, see the great bow sinking; he could hear the splintering of the bulk-heads, the screams of the people tumbling up the companionways, the panic and pandemonium, the mad rush for the boats, the horrid, slow subsidence. But it was not to be; the danger had gone by!

Now he remembered having heard that first low whistle before the two that had signaled so plainly: "I have my helm to starboard—passing to starboard of you!" And yet, well did he know that no fires blazed in those dead furnaces, no steam was coming from that rusty, salt-incrusted funnel. It was as if the dead had spoken to warn the living! He shivered once more, and staggered to the bridge-ladder, holding on and listening.

Three, four, five times did the Caronia's siren wail out into the stillness. No reply. And then the throbbing pulses took up their beat again.

Down in the corner of the main saloon, filled with chattering people, romping children, and game-playing young folk, who knew not what had passed on deck, sat the Silly Ass, the girl close to him.

"I'll never tell," she whispered. "What is it you're thinking of?"

The round eyes gazed into hers. "It's a long time since I did," he said.

"Did what?"

"Prayed! God made me a fool just to do this some day, I guess." His face showed the expression of a grown-up, sobered man.

On the bridge, the captain and the other officers were talking in low, awe-struck tones.



WAR ON THE TIGER

BY W. G. FITZ-GERALD

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND FROM DRAWINGS BY FRANKLIN BOOTH

The patwari salaamed and laid a report on my desk—a thing of maps and figures that brought the sweat to my face. Fifty-seven killed, six hundred square miles of rich rice and sugar country demoralized, communications stopped, crops rotting on the ground, nine villages abandoned, and the shyest of jungle creatures grazing in the market-place! Tiger and tigress—a bad case.

When I told a man once that tigers and cobras, between them, made away with 25,000 human beings in India every year, he thought I was joking. "Why," said he, "surely one fifth of the human race—325,000,000, at any rate—is packed into that triangle! Where can the tigers live?" But I underestimated it; there were just 24,938 killed in 1906 by tigers alone. You can see it yourself in the government records.

Now, as District Officer, I'm the "father" of two million souls, and responsible for all things, from murder to measles. But this was beyond me. It was a Commissioner's job, backed by the Maharaja.

The man-eaters, now propitiated as gods, had taken toll of my villagers for two long years. The people were in abject terror, for none knew the day, hour, or place of the monsters' next leap. Many were already resigned to death. "It's written on our foreheads," they said, with gentle misery. Poor devils! Think of the two hundred millions of them in India oscillating between mere existence and positive starvation; not living, but just strong enough to crawl along on the edge of death!

I called the tahsildar: "Bring me the record of these tigers."

A bulky file of horrors, in truth! Here a goatherd was taken; there it was an old woman gathering sticks in the jungle, or children playing in the village street, or maybe girls going down to the river for water, laughing joyously, unaware of the great green eyes that watched them through the towering stalks of elephant-grass; and last among the victims came some desperate young men who had faced one of the creatures with fish-spears.



It was a difficult country of limitless forest, broken in places by low hills and by bare sites of the typical village of India. And apparently from all quarters came the same report, with little modification. Here is a specimen:



"As I rode into camp at Bussavanpur to-day, I was met by trackers who told me the death wail was 'up' in the village. They brought to me a woman with three small children. Her husband was the latest victim. With tearless Hindu apathy she told her story, and I gave her five rupees. She had to spend half this, according to caste usage, because it was said to be the devil in her that had led the yellow devil to him. The formalities over, she was admitted to the villages of her caste, and then took me to the tragic scene. A solitary tamarind-tree grew on some rocks near the village; no jungle within three hundred yards; a few bushes on the rock crevices. And close by ran the broad cattle-track into the village. The man had been following the cattle home in the evening, and must have stopped to knock down some tamarinds with his stick; for this last, with his black blanket and skin cap, still lay where he was seized. Evidently the tigress had hidden in the rocks, and was upon him in one bound. Dragging her victim to the edge of a rocky plateau, she leaped down into a field and there killed him. The spot was marked by a pool of dried blood. I walked for two hours with the trackers, hoping to come on some traces of the brute or her mate, but without success."

And so on. Some of the deaths were horrible by reason of the eery silence that marked them, others because of the mysterious movements or amazing cunning of the tigers. The comic episodes it were not seemly to dwell upon. But fifty-seven! Nothing for it now but a hurry call to the Commissioner and the Maharaja for elephants and an army of tiger-hunters, a mobilization of the best shikaris in all India, for a regular campaign against these beasts.

In fourteen days that army was on the spot, and I enlisted under the banner of Colonel Howe of the Tenth Hussars. The staff was made up of shikaris, and the beaters were of the rank and file. Maps were called for and studied, scouts sent far and wide into the theater of operations; native reports were sifted and their exaggerations discounted with the skill of long practice.



Tiger war is a science with axioms of its own. First of all come the weather and the water-supply. It's useless to look for tigers in a dry country, and it's useless to try and find them in the wet season, when there is plenty of water everywhere. "Stripes" must be hunted in hot weather, when great heat and the water distribution limit his wanderings, and when forest leaves have fallen and the dense jungle is thinned out.

And yet, there are all kinds of problems. For instance, Indian weather is so erratic that, while there may be water and cover and tigers one season, all three will be absent the next. Further, there is marked individuality among tigers. One will lie in water all day, and never venture forth till the sun has sunk behind the western hills; another prowls boldly by day. Some prey on forest beasts—chiefly the spotted cheetah and sambur-stag; others, again, mark out domestic animals. And last comes the tigress with clamorous cubs, who suddenly learns by accident or impulse that man, hitherto so feared, is in reality the easiest prey of all.

We had a front of eighty miles. Naturally we needed a big force; we probably mustered three hundred, all told. Our base of operations was a railroad-station twenty miles away, and we doubted at first whether we could live on the country, for the terrified people had abandoned all cultivation, and were living on bamboo-seeds and the fleshy blossoms of the mahwa-tree. This was a serious question—this and our transport. We had seventy-four elephants, and each ate seven hundred pounds of green stuff or sugar-cane every day; and of camels, bullocks, rude carts, and horses we had hundreds, to say nothing of the dozens of buffaloes we carried as live bait for tigers. We should need fodder by the ton, as well as sheep, fowl, goats, game, and milk; grain, too, for the crowds of camp-followers; and canned foods and medicines—including, not least, the store of carbolic acid for possible tiger-bites and maulings. The water was to be boiled and filtered, then treated with permanganate of potash. It was regular army equipment, you see.

I went out myself with the shikari scouts, inspecting jungle-paths, dry river-beds, and muddy margins of pools. They pointed out to me the first rudiments in nature's book of signs: first of all the tiger "pug," and the difference between the footprints of the tiger and the tigress—the male's square, the female's a clear-cut oval. Here the great tiger had drunk four days ago. The prints were not clear; in places they were obliterated by tracks of bear, deer, and porcupine.

But clearly we were in a favorite haunt of both man-eaters. The male must have passed after dawn, for his tracks overlay those of little quail, which do not emerge until after daybreak. Then yet more signs: muddy pools told mute tales of recent visits; high over the hill that fell sheer to the valley were specks of vultures, hovering over recent kills. Back to camp we went to report the enemy's presence.

The next move was the setting out of the live bait—the buffaloes. Twoscore of the slow, ponderous creatures were led out and staked in a great ring about the tigers, passive outposts about the enemy, inviting their attack—an attack sure to come during the night. Then we went back again to wait.



Meanwhile, during the time while scouts were reconnoitering the enemy, the rank and file had been offering sacrifices to their gods. The Moslems were less tiresome than the Hindus in this respect. They merely went in a body to the snow-white zariat (saint-house) on the hill, and offered up a goat. But the Brahman deity had to be propitiated, lest all our plans go down to defeat. This god dwelt in a jungle, attended by an old jogi smeared with wood-ashes and streaked with paint. Another goat was slain here. The beast was made to bow comically three times before the hideous image in the shrine, and then his throat was cut. Victory was now sure. The pious preliminaries were finished, and then arrived at last the day of battle—the scenes of which you never forget.

* * * * *

We are up and out at dawn, riding about the wide circle of the tethered buffaloes. A delicate business, this. As we draw near the first one, with infinite caution, we inspect the site through strong binoculars. A flick of the ear, a whisk of the tail because of flies, show that No. 1 is still alive. We water and feed the beast with fresh grass, and then leave him. But our next place of call looks suspicious, even from afar. A crow is cawing in a tree, and looks with beady eyes below. Dark vulture-specks are wheeling in the blue. And see! Tiger-marks in the dust, both square and oval! The dread couple have been here—early in the night, evidently, for over their "pug"-marks lies the trail of porcupines and other nocturnal beasts. Sure enough, the big buffalo is gone, leaving only a broken rope-end, a few splashes of blood, and the labored trail of a heavy body. Strategy is ended now, and tactics begin.

We gallop back to camp and give the alarm. The huge battle-line is ready. Long rows of giant tuskers stand with swaying heads, each with his howdah beside him—towering brutes such as the old kings of Asia rode into battle, to the terror of their enemies. The herds of disdainful camels are kneeling in roaring protest against the camp loads. From all quarters scouts have reported the enemy. Our army, horse and foot, elephants and camels, will march in an hour—as strange a sight and as strange a work as may be witnessed in the world to-day.

Watch each elephant kneel and come prone for his big hunting-tower. There are five men to each elephant, one at his head, four to haul the gear and make fast. The deft skill, the swiftness and silence, show the veteran in the enemy's country. Every man knows his work and knows the officer above him; and each officer, too, knows just what is expected of him—from the lowest up to the colonel himself, a fine figure, tall, erect, white-haired, an adept in tiger-lore, with a hundred and fifty skins in his bungalow.



Twelve mounted sahibs gallop this way and that, collecting shikaris and beaters. Native officers distribute fire-works and tom-toms, rattles and flint-locks and torches. The mot d'ordre is: "Kick up——at the right time."

There is a brief, businesslike interview in old Howe's tent. "The tigers," he says in a matter-of-fact way, as though dismissing school, "shall be inclosed in a triangle, of which the apex shall be ourselves and the elephants. You will draw lots for positions among yourselves. The bases of the triangle shall be the beaters, and the flanks the stops posted up trees, who shall see that the tigers do not turn and break out of the beat. You will please be alert, with rifles cocked and barrels and cartridges examined beforehand. There must be no undue noise or haste. Remember, the clink of a finger-ring on a barrel or the gleam of the sun on a bright muzzle may turn them. That's all, gentlemen."

We troop out to distribute rifles to the sepoys, who are supposed to protect the unarmed beaters. Some of us ride off for miles into the jungle to the base of the fateful triangle. Others visit the "stops"—keen-eyed shikaris, perched like crows in the big sal-trees.

Then hark—a shot! It travels like fire, and is answered by a faint uproar. The beat has begun. We dismount from our elephants for a steady shot, leaving them behind us in a huge semicircle. Some of them scent danger, and twirl delicate trunks high in the air. They have "been there" before! The mahouts sit motionless as bronze figures—superb fellows, deeply learned in jungle-lore. The triangle's apex and flanks are in absolute silence, but the base is fiendish with uproar. Two hundred men are yelling and cursing, roaring and singing, beating pots and pans, tom-toms and gongs.

Hearts beat a little faster. We look at one another anxiously and whisper, "Is the beat empty?" It would seem so, for the cunning brutes give no sign. Yet they must be driven forward if they are there. Ha! a slender sal-tree to the left shakes with excitement. A turbaned head shoots out of its branches, with a sudden sound of hand-clapping and shouting. One of the stops has seen a stirring in the high yellow grass. The tigers are in the living net!

I call to my side Hyder Ali, my gun-bearer, a lean Pathan from the Khyber Pass.

"You have my .303?"

He nods and smiles. At that moment I hear a heavy footfall, as of some great beast, on the thick dry leaves. The high grass parts. First a magnificent yellow head emerges, infinitely alert; then the long, lithe body, a picture of supple grace and immense strength. A superb spectacle the creature presents, with his lovely coat gleaming in the hot sun. But the din is drawing near. Down goes the massive head; wide, cruel lips draw back, and four long primary fangs are bared in a gruff roar. Then he dashes forward for cover. But too late; I have drawn a bead on his rippling shoulder and fired.

He is down, fighting and biting at he knows not what; and his roars rise high above the wild pandemonium of the beaters.

But my shot has not killed. I give the alarm, and we put scouts up trees to direct the ticklish pursuit along the bloody trail. We drive herds of buffaloes into the long grass and brush to drive out the wounded tiger. Our general himself takes charge, with few words and sure tactics.

"We've got his mate," he says grimly. "I put her on a pad-elephant and sent her back to camp."

It is growing dark. I hear the sambur-stag belling from the mountain-side, and the monotonous call of the coel, or Indian cuckoo. Afar a peacock calls from a ruined tomb, and through all the jungle concert runs the continuous screech of the cicada.

A loud signal from a treed scout suddenly tells us my tiger is located. Relentlessly, foot by foot, the man-eater is tracked. We are guided always by the scouts in the trees; for that terrible bamboo-like grass swallows even elephants, swaying noisily to their moving bulk. At length we emerge in a little clearing; and even as we glance around, the stalks part harshly, and the tiger leaps forth at an unarmed beater, burying fangs in a soundless throat. An awful sight!

A dozen rifles roar too late to save the poor wretch. We pick up victim and tiger and heave them on a pad-elephant. And then back to camp.



THE RADICAL JUDGE

BY ANITA FITCH

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR G. DOVE

Often when, arm in arm with black Double-headed Pete, the Radical Judge went by the paling fence, Hope Carolina said to herself:

"W'en he comes all lonely, jus' by his own self, I'll frow a rock at him. Yes, sholy!"

Unconscious of the danger that lurked in future ambush, the great politician would pass on, the rear view of his little stiff, quickly stepping figure showing a high silk hat and the parted tails of a broadcloth coat, which in front buttoned importantly at the waist. Dressed with exactly the same splendor, even to the waist-buttoning of the coat, the huge negro towered a full head taller than his hated, feared, and brilliant intimate.

In that secret, mysterious way which was a feature of the troublous times, both were recognized targets for other missiles than stones flung by dimpled baby hands.

* * * * *

It was an educating period for small maids of six, that long-ago time of bitter party hatred. Though only a short half-dozen years crowned her fair cropped head, and she lisped still in an adorable baby way, Hope Carolina was very wise—"monstrous wise," the black people said. She did not understand the meaning of "renegade" exactly,—the Radical Judge was a renegade too,—but she knew all about Reconstruction. It was what made them, the black people, so sassy, and your own darling family wretched.



She knew, too, that Radical judges always wore chain shirts under their white ones, because they were afraid; and that they carried knives, oh, mighty big ones, forever up their sleeves, to show in bar-rooms sometimes to Uncle John when anybody talked too loudly of renegades and turn-coats. Then, too, and worst of all, they got rich in a single night and took beautiful homes from dear Prestons and lived in them themselves. The beloved Prestons, so nobly proud in their fallen fortunes,—so right and proper in their politics,—had once owned all the lovely grounds alongside the bald yard that inclosed the child's own hired house; grounds where peacocks were as much at home as in story-books—peacocks with tails more ravishing than fly-brushes; where magnolia-trees flung down big scented petals as fascinating as sheets of letter-paper, and tall poplars stood like angels with half-closed wings against the sky. And with her own tear-filled eyes Hope Carolina had seen the exiled ones depart from this paradise crying, ah, so bitterly; turning back, as the breaking heart turns, for long, last, kissing looks. And now the Radical Judge lived there—the bad Radical Judge who went locked-arms with niggers; lived there with the wife who took things to forget, and the little crippled child who had never walked in her life because somebody had let her fall long ago.



Hope Carolina could never go over again and make brown writing marks on the sweet magnolia petals. She could never steal suddenly through the boxwood hedge which hid the paling fence at that side of the hired yard, and frighten the peacocks so that they would spread their tails proudly. Everything belonged to the Radical Judge, even the old yellow satin sofas in the parlor, on which negroes sat now. And besides, no matter how poor they were, Democrat families never had anything to do with Radical families. They only threw "rocks" at them—safely from behind fences.

One day the pile of stones near the broken paling fence seemed splendidly high. They were muddy too, splendidly muddy, for it had rained in the night, and Hope Carolina had gouged the last ones out of the wet dirt with a sharp stick. She had even intentionally kept nice pats of earth around some; and directly, with the enemy approaching in the lonely way desired, there she was "scrouged" behind the paling fence, as Robert Lee Preston scrouged when he threw stones at Radicals. The brisk heels clicked nearer—passed; and then, with a fine sweep of a fat arm, a loud "ooh, ooh, ooh," she let fly the deadly missile.

The effect of it was magical. The enemy leaped as if the long-expected bullet had indeed pierced his chain armor; for the stone, perhaps the tiniest in Democracy's fort, had neatly nipped his stiff back. But the dark frown he turned toward her changed instantly. A slow smile, and then laughter—the doting laughter of the child-lover, to whom even the naughtiest phases are dear—replaced it. And, indeed, Hope Carolina did seem a sweet and comical figure in her low-necked, short-sleeved calico, with her brass toes hitched in the paling fence somehow, and her cropped head rising barely above it. Excitement, too, had lent a warmer pink to her apple cheeks, and her blue eyes were like deep and hating stars.

"Oh, you bad baby!" he called in a moment, plainly ravished with the nature of his would-be assassin. He knew why the stone had come—only too well. "You hateful little Democrat!"

Hope Carolina fired up furiously at that. "Wadical!" she called back, her voice tremulous with rage. And then, deliberately, "Wenegade! Seef!" fell from her pouting baby lips.

A change came over the Radical Judge's face. It did not smile any longer; and yet, somehow—somehow—it did not seem exactly angry. He came a step nearer the paling fence.

"Little girl," he began softly, pleadingly, almost prayerfully. But the thrower of stones waited to hear no more. As he came nearer, almost near enough to touch, holding her with dumb eyes so different from those she had expected, she fired another shot—it seemed just to fly out of her hand—and ran.

As she scrambled up the high house steps, which went rented-fashion in Fairville, from the ground to the second story, she remembered the black splotch it had made on his white shirt; and then she remembered another thing—the chain one underneath, to keep away rocks and bullets and everything. Ah, if he hadn't worn that she might have killed him; and then all the trouble in dear South Carolina would be over forever and ever, amen.

As she sat in her high-chair at supper, eating hot raised corn-bread and sugar-sweet sorghum, it seemed a dreadful thing that she hadn't really done it; and directly, when a blue-eyed, full-breasted goddess, known in the hired house as Ma and Miss Kate, looked meaningly across the table, she sighed profoundly.

The fair lady, whose beauty was clouded by a deep sadness, turned soon to the third sitter at the table, a tall, lank gentleman of perhaps thirty-five, who, with dark, brooding eyes and a serious limp, had just entered. He was the redoubtable Uncle John, of loud and fearless opinion; and, if the bar-room bowie had missed him, a stray Radical bullet had been more successful. A political fight in the railroad turn-table, some months ago, had been the scene of this heartbreaking accident. "And all through the war without a scratch!" Ma had sobbed out to Mrs. Preston when speaking of that bullet, still in the long-booted leg now under the table.

Directly Hope Carolina forgot the reproof of mother eyes anent the table manners of well-brought-up children. She began listening attentively; for that was how, listening when Ma and Uncle John talked, she had acquired all her deep knowledge of men and things. For in this close domestic circle all the lurid happenings of the times were touched upon: more fights in the turn-table; barbecues, black enemy barbecues—at which the bad Radical Judge stood on stumps, with his blacked shoes Close together and his beaver hat off, as if he were talking, truly, to white people; where negroes, poor, pitiful, hungry, corn-field negroes, were bought with scorched beef and bad whisky to vote any which way. Even the price of bacon, the woeful rises in the corn-meal market, were discussed here—all the poignant things, indeed, which, as has been seen, had inspired Hope Carolina's own poignant and beautiful name.

Now they were speaking of Double-headed Pete, sweet, sorry Ma and good Uncle John, who must limp forever because he hadn't worn chain things underneath. Pete was feeling the oats of his new office, Uncle John said, and Ma said back, "To think!" and looked at Uncle John as if she were sorry for him.

Hope Carolina sat very quietly, but she was thinking hard. She knew Pete: he was a bad, bad nigger; and though he locked arms with white Radicals, and got a big, big salary, he could only put crosses instead of names at the bottom of the important papers. It seemed a strange thing that anybody who couldn't write names should get big salaries, when Uncle John, who did heavenly writing, couldn't get any at all. Then, along with everything else, there was Pete's maiden speech on the court-house steps—oh, a terrible maiden speech!

"De white man is had his day."

Whether there was any more of it Hope Carolina did not ask herself. That was enough, for folks looked tiptoe if you only spoke Pete's name.

Directly, thinking over it all, Hope Carolina said earnestly to herself, "Maybe I'd better put 'em back," meaning the two thrown stones. It looked, yes, truly, as if she would have to kill Pete, too; so her arsenal for destruction must not lack ammunition. It must rather flow over than fall short.

But a liberal allowance of hot corn-bread and sorghum are not conducive to murderous zeal. Slowly, almost painfully, the child got down from her high-chair. She went faster down the steep house steps; but as she neared the stone fort by the paling fence she halted, all but paralyzed by the audacity which was being committed under her very eyes.

Somebody was stooping down outside the fence, with a hand through the broken place, putting something—two round, pinky somethings!—on top of the stone fort, putting them exactly where the two spent shots had been.



"Oh!" ejaculated Hope Carolina; and, reaching the fence with a rush, she stared down lovingly. For they were peaches, real, live, human peaches—the kind that you buy for five cents apiece, which was a great price in the hired house.

The form outside the fence straightened up then, and two oldish gray eyes looked over it into hers—the Radical Judge's eyes. "No more stones, please," they seemed to say, with a trace of embarrassment at being caught.

Hope Carolina nodded back with a lovely courtesy, as if to say in return: "Sholy not."

For this was no moment for politics. Besides, something in the watching eyes—a wistful something which spoke louder than words—had awakened all the lady in her; and there was more of it, I can tell you, than you may be inclined to believe.

Silently, with eyes still meeting eyes, they stood there for a moment; the great Radical almost shrinkingly, the fiery little Democrat with a new, sweet feeling which made her seem, for the instant, the bigger, stronger one of the two. Then, still silent, he was gone; and snatching the peaches with another ecstatic "Oh!" Hope Carolina did the thing she had dumbly promised. She kicked down the stone fort.

After she was in bed, she explained the deed to herself; for there, with reflection, had come some of the pangs that must pierce the breast of the traitor in any decent camp. You can't take peaches and throw stones too, no, not even if Democrats would almost want to hang you for not doing it!

She had come to the pits by now, and these, after more rapturous suckings, she put under her pillow for planting; for when you are six you plant everything. She did not know that another and more wonderful seed had already put forth a green shoot in her own so piteously hardened little heart.

Hope Carolina slept in a marvelous bed, almost the only thing of value, in fact, left in the hired house. Ma would not use it herself, she told dear friends, because of its memories; but as the child of the house had no recollections of other times, it seemed to her always a downy and restful nest. There were carved pineapples at the top of the high mahogany posts, and four more at the bottom of them; and when Hope Carolina lay in it in the morning, she could see everything that was going on in the Radical Judge's garden—that lovely paradise of peacocks and poplars and magnolias which had once been the dear Prestons'.

Sometimes, even before the truce of peaches, she had felt a little regret that the decencies barred out all acquaintance with Radical families. For always on the hot mornings—long, long before it was time for her to get up—there were the Radical Judge and the little crippled Grace going about among the shrubs and flowers as if they were the nicest people. And always the little pale, laughing child presented a very pretty picture in the wheeled chair, which her father pushed so patiently; forever turning back to kiss him, with her hands full of flowers, and with the peacocks trailing beside as if they had forgotten the dear Prestons entirely.

Then, the Radical Judge seemed to know bushels and bushels of fairy-stories; and when they came near the boxwood hedge, Hope Carolina would sometimes hear him begin a new one. They always began in the right way, "Once upon a time," and that seemed very remarkable, for how could a Radical Judge know the right sort of fairy-stories?

When they moved away again, the child in the enemy house would feel her throat gulp sometimes. She knew it was wrong, but oh, she would have loved to hear the end!

One morning, weeks and weeks after the peaches, when the peacocks had been gone for days,—they made too much noise, Hope Carolina knew,—when all the empty, sunburned garden seemed to say weepingly, "There will be no more fairy-tales," she woke with the morning star, and, sitting bolt up in bed, blinked wonderingly, a little painfully, in the direction of the Radical Judge's front door. It was too dark to see the knob yet, but she knew the thing must be there, the long, angelically sweet drop of white ribbon and flowers—the poetic and wistful mourning which is only hung for little dead children.

A great doctor had come down from Baltimore and gone again; and the Radical Judge's wife was still taking things to forget.

* * * * *

The heart of six is full of mystery. All that first morning, with a piteous earnestness, a piteous heartlessness, Hope Carolina played funeral in the front yard, in the place where the stone fort had once been and where the peach-pits were now planted. Every now and then she would stop patting the little mounds of earth—mounds of earth covered with sweet flowers, in a place as beautiful as any garden, were the chief thing in her idea of funerals—and, standing tiptoe, she would stare over the paling fence, hoping the Radical Judge would come by. At last, late in the forenoon, her dogged vigilance was rewarded; and in a moment, bonnetless, an untidy midget in low-necked pink calico which even had a hole behind—there she was out of the gate, following closely at his heels. She couldn't tell exactly why she followed him; she only knew she wanted to—perhaps to see if he thought, too, as everybody said, that the little crippled Grace was better off up in the sky. She fancied maybe he didn't, he was so different, somehow—not like the old, fierce Radical Judge at all. And when really nice white gentlemen—Democrats, who had never noticed him before—stood respectfully aside with their beaver hats off, he walked still down the middle of the dirt sidewalk, and did not seem to see them at all.



Once when her brass-toed shoe kicked his heel by the railroad,—along which, the littlest distance away, was the historic spot where Uncle John had got the bullet,—she said "Thank you" aloud.

She meant it for the peaches, for she had just remembered that it wasn't very polite not to thank people for things. But still he seemed not to see, not to hear; and directly, in this blind, groping way, as if he were falling to pieces somehow, there he was turning into Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store, where they only sold lady things.

Hope Carolina waited outside, openly and shamelessly watching to see what he was going to do. She never peeped secretly; that wouldn't be respectable.

In a minute she said, "Oh!" her eyes stretched wide with delighted wonder; for he was buying lady things—fairy lace, shimmering satin, narrow doll-baby ribbon, as lovely as heaven! When he went out, quickly, as if he were almost running, Hope Carolina still waited, wondering what Miss Sally and Miss Polly, the two old-maid sisters, who were Democrats and very nice people themselves, were going to do with the splendor which still lay upon the counter.

But they did not tell. They told something else—a thing so full of wonder, so dreadful, that, with another exclamation, one which drew four astonished maiden eyes to her suddenly blanched cheeks, the child took to her heels and fled as if pursued by a thousand terrors.

She thought of it all the time she was eating more hot corn-bread and sorghum at dinner—the thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said to each other; the thing which seemed so new, so strange, so loud and awful, like the hellfire things Baptist ministers talked about.

Then, after supper, she fell asleep in the pineapple bed, still thinking of it; and all the next day, still playing funeral by the paling fence, she thought of it again. And that night, when once more she lay in the pineapple bed, there it was again, the strange loud thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said to each other—said in a soft, crying way.

All at once she had a waked-up feeling; she sat bolt upright in bed and thought, "Comp'ny." There were voices coming across the passageway from the parlor. A light streamed, too; and when she stood faintly bathed in its glow, she saw that Mrs. Preston was there—Mrs. Preston, in the deep mourning she had vowed never to put off as long as her beloved State lay with her head in the dust. But something in her lap brightened it now, this shabby, soldier-widow black: a slim cross, divine with green and white, as daintily delicate, with its tremulous myrtle stars, as had been the lady things in Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store.

Mrs. Preston was saying that she was going to send it "anonymously." Then she asked Ma if she knew that he had had to attend to all the arrangements himself. "Even the dress," went on Mrs. Preston, crying a little; and Uncle John coughed in the deep, growly way gentlemen always cough when they are ashamed to cry themselves.

Then they all began talking about funerals, saying to each other they would like to go, but how could they? Uncle John saying at last, with more of the growly, coughy way, that no, no, they "couldn't flout him."

It would be more cruel, far, far more cruel, said Uncle John, than to stay away. Besides,—didn't the ladies know?—it was private. "Though," the speaker went on, his worn, somber face lighting up with something like a gleam of comfort, "I reckon that was to keep those other white hounds away as well as the rest of us."

Ma nodded. They weren't gentlemen-born, as he was, she sighed—"born to Southern best." And then, with a "Poor wretch—poor, proud, degraded wretch!" she handed out the thing she had been making—a white rosette as beautiful as any rose—and told Mrs. Preston to put it "there," touching the myrtle cross with fingers kissing-soft.

But Mrs. Preston only said back, "He's refused even the minister!" and seemed more unhappy, oh, mighty unhappy.

Hope Carolina gasped with the wonderment of it all. How funny it seemed, how dreadfully funny, that everybody had forgotten everything just because a child had gone up into the sky: Uncle John the bullet, and Mrs. Preston the lost paradise next door, and Ma the barbecue speeches that made niggers vote any which way—all, all that Radicals had ever done to them!

After a while one of the voices spoke again—whose, Hope Carolina could never tell:

"Think, there won't be a white face there!" And then, after a pause, another voice:

"No, not one!"

Hope Carolina jumped in bed, trembling.

Presently Mrs. Preston went, and then everybody else went to bed. But still Hope Carolina trembled. For that was exactly what Miss Polly and Miss Sally Graham had said—about the white face.

After a while she knew. It meant, oh, the mightiest, biggest disgrace on earth not to have white people at your funerals. They went to black funerals, even—good black funerals.

"Oh!" moaned Hope Carolina suddenly, loud enough for everybody to hear. But she cried silently. It was a way she had.

She cried again in the night, too—so loudly everybody did hear; but the dream mother who came and loved her, putting her head on the dear place, drove away all the lumps in her throat. After that the dark was still like the dear place, and like arms around her, too.

She had forgotten the dream mother when breakfast came; but she hadn't forgotten the other thing—the thing about the white face.

Ma said anxiously once to Uncle John, "Do you think she can be sick, brother?" and Uncle John shook his head, though he knew, too, of the tearful night.

Hope Carolina sat very still, not seeming to hear even when Ma announced that the funeral was at nine o'clock. She ate her breakfast like a ravenous cherub, smiling silently, mysteriously, whenever her mother looked at her with adoring eyes. Sometimes these dear, watching eyes, as blue as jewels, set wide apart under a low brow crowned with waved, satin-bright brown hair, filled slowly. But the darling child, who had certainly proved her excellent condition, only grinned back sweetly. All Hope Carolina was thinking of was that she had a hole—she was still wearing the soiled pink calico—and that her frilled white apron was mussed, and that shoe-strings wouldn't tie good. In the tarnished gilt-framed mirror behind Ma's lovely head she could see her own. That was all right; beautiful! She had doused it with water, the round baby poll, and plastered the short hair smooth, so that under this close, shining cap her apple cheeks seemed fresher than ever.

Ma kissed them in passing, going then swiftly, with her eyes closed tight lest she herself should see, to shut windows on that side of the house. Hope Carolina knew. Children mustn't look out of windows when funerals were going on. They mustn't play in the yard, either, till after they were over.

The big clock in the corner ticked, ticked, ticked, seeming to say always, "Hurry up, hurry up." And then—it was the longest, longest while afterward—Ma called from another room that Hopey (it was the foolish home name) could go and play in the yard now, for it was nine o'clock.

"Quite half-past, darling," went on the liquid Southern voice, still tremulous with emotion, still with the yearning anxiety for its own that the death of any child of kindred age brings to the mother breast. But there was no answer, and for a very good reason.

Down the long clay road which led from living and now pitying Fairville to the little cemetery where slept its quiet dead, Hope Carolina was running.

* * * * *

A mile and a half is a long way for a wee fat maiden to go when the August sun is beating down upon bare heads and necks, and red clay roads spread sun-baked ruts and furrows as sharp as knives. As many times as her years, Hope Carolina fell by the way; oftener, indeed. But the good folk in the scattered blind-closed houses along the way—who, too, a half-hour ago had whispered tremulously, "There won't be a white face"—saw no sign of tears.

"It's only Hope Carolina," called somebody, and other watchers laughed; for all knew the wandering ways of this wise and fearless child.

And so, stumbling, falling, struggling to her feet again,—wiping away blood once, even, with impatient hand,—on, on the little figure in pink and white had gone, a brave and storm-driven flower in the cruel road. And at last there were the shining crosses and columns of the dead. One inclosure, radiant with more magnolias and angel poplars, more stately and wonderful than all the rest, was the dear Preston plot.

The child, who had paused anxiously at the open gate, sighed, sighed with immense relief, to see it still without the sacrilege of Radical invasion. He hadn't taken that, too! Then, a step farther, she stopped again. The red clayey place he had taken had neither fence nor flowers. Only a tree grew near his place, a great solitary pine, with the low wailing of whose softly swaying needles singing was mingled.

A single person was singing—a single black person. She knew by the soft mellow roll of the voice, the sweet, oh, honey-sweet sound of the hymn words, which she herself had sung many times at the Baptist Sunday-school, where she had to go when there was no Episcopal minister. The great figure towering above the tiny, dusky group, with bare woolly head and working, apelike face uplifted to the sky, took on a new grandeur.

But only for a moment did she think of Pete, so marvelously changed. The hymn was ending—they were a long way past the dear line, Safe on his gentle breast.

Now they were moving, the little "crowd of mo'ners over yonder,"—all black it looked, house-servants mostly,—and quickly, with a breathless fear of being too late, she rushed forward and thrust her head between the singer and a sobbing petticoated figure beside him.

Then she drew back smiling, smiling divinely.

The grief-stricken eyes at the other side of the little grave—a grave heaped with Radical roses, sweet with one Democrat myrtle cross—had seen it, the white face.

"You go fust, honey, jus' behin' him," Pete whispered, as, trudging valiantly along with the rest, Hope Carolina passed out of the cemetery gate.

It was the quaint custom at funerals in Fairville, especially funerals with negroes, to follow mourners in line from the grave as well as to it. What had been begun through a lack of sidewalks had been continued as a ceremony of passionate respect.

Pete bent soft, wet, grateful eyes upon her, pushing her close behind the one carriage as he spoke—eyes as dear and tender as any old nigger eyes Hope Carolina had ever looked into. All at once she understood: Pete, bad Pete, loved the Radical judge.

She nodded comprehendingly, including all the other black faces—which seemed to look toward her, too, with a doglike gratitude—in her flashing smile.

"Of course!"

* * * * *

So it came to pass that Fairville's terrible prophecy was falsified. In his darkest hour the Radical Judge was not forsaken of all his race; still unconscious of fatigue and hurt in the cruel clay road, the little white Democrat, who had toiled this hard way before, led and redeemed the funeral procession of his child.



POVERTY AND DISCONTENT IN RUSSIA

BY GEORGE KENNAN

In an address delivered in New York City on the 14th of January, 1908, Paul Milyukov, historian, statesman, and leader of the Constitutional Democratic party in the third Russian Duma, after reviewing dispassionately, from a liberal point of view, the unsuccessful attempt at revolution in the great empire of the north, summed up, in the following words, his conclusions with regard to the present Russian situation:

"The social composition of the future Russia is now at stake; the fate of future centuries is now being determined"; but, "wherever we turn or look, we meet only with new trouble to come, nowhere with any hope for conciliation or social peace. This, I am afraid, is not the message that you expected from me, and I should be much happier myself if I could answer your wish for information with words of hope, and with the glad tidings that quiet and security have returned to Russia; but I am here to tell you the truth."

Americans who have not followed closely the sequence of events in Russia since October, 1905, may feel inclined to ask, "Why should Mr. Milyukov take such a pessimistic view of the future, when his country has not only a representative assembly, but an imperial guaranty of political freedom and 'real inviolability of personal rights'?" The answer is not far to seek. A representative assembly that has no power, and an imperial guaranty that affords no security, do not encourage hopeful anticipations. Russia has never had a representative assembly, in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the words; and as for the imperial guaranty of political freedom, it was written in water.

Twenty-seven months ago, when Count Witte reported to Nicholas II. that Russia had "outgrown its governmental framework," and when the Czar himself, recognizing the necessity of "establishing civil liberty on unshakable foundations," directed his ministers to give the country political freedom and allow the Duma to control legislation, there seemed to be every reason for believing that the crisis had passed and that the people's fight for self-government had been won; but, unfortunately, the unstable Czar, who would run into any mold, but would not keep shape, did not adhere to his avowed purpose for a single week. In the words of a Russian peasant song:

The Czar promised lightly to go, And made all his plans for departing; Then he called for a chair, And sat down right there, To rest for a while before starting.

Not even so much as an attempt was made to carry the "freedom manifesto" into effect, and before the ink with which it was written had fairly had time to dry, the rejoicing people, who assembled with flags and mottos in the streets of the principal cities to celebrate the dawn of civil liberty, were attacked and forcibly dispersed by the police, and were then cruelly beaten or mercilessly slaughtered by adherents of a national monarchistic association, hostile to the manifesto, which called itself the "Union of True Russians."[27] According to the conservative estimate of Mr. Milyukov, these "true Russians," with the sympathy and cooeperation of the police, killed or wounded no less than thirteen thousand other Russians, whom they regarded as not "true," in the very first week after the freedom manifesto was promulgated. One not familiar with Russian conditions might have supposed that the Czar would use all the force at his command to stop these murderous "pogroms" and to punish the police and the "true Russians" who were responsible for them; but he seems to have regarded them as convincing proof that all true Russians would rather have autocracy than freedom, and, instead of insisting upon obedience to his manifesto and punishing those who resorted to wholesale murder as a means of protesting against it, he not only allowed the slaughter to go on, but, a few months later, showed his sympathy with the "true Russians" by telegraphing to their president as follows:

"Let the Union of the Russian People serve as a trustworthy support. I am sure that all true Russians who love their country will unite still more closely, and, while steadily increasing their number, will help me to bring about the peaceful regeneration of our great and holy Russia."[28]

Disappointed at the Czar's failure to stand by his own manifesto, and exasperated by the murderous attacks of the Black Hundreds upon defenseless people in the streets, the Social Democrats, the Social Revolutionists, and the extreme opponents of the government generally resorted to a series of armed revolts, which finally culminated in the bloody barricade-fighting in the streets of Moscow in December, 1905. Taking alarm at these revolutionary outbreaks, and yielding to the reactionary pressure that was brought to bear upon him by the ultra-conservative wing of the court party, the Czar abandoned the reforms which he had declared to be the expression of his "inflexible will,"[29] and permitted his governors and governors-general to "put down sedition" in the old arbitrary way, with imprisonment, exile, the Cossack's whip and the hangman's noose.

Long before the meeting of the first Duma the freedom manifesto had become a dead letter; and in July, 1906, when Mr. Makarof, the Associate Minister of the Interior, was called before the Duma to explain the inconsistency between the "inflexible will" of the Czar, as expressed in the freedom manifesto, and the policy of the administration, as shown in a long series of arbitrary and oppressive acts of violence, he coolly said that while the freedom manifesto "laid down the fundamental principles of civil liberty in a general way," it had no real force, because it did not specifically repeal the laws relating to the subject that were already on the statute-books. He admitted that governors-general were still arresting without warrant, exiling without trial, suppressing newspapers without a hearing, and dispersing public meetings by an arbitrary exercise of discretionary power; but he maintained that in so doing they were only obeying imperial ukases which antedated the freedom manifesto and which that document had not abrogated. In all provinces, he said, where martial law had been declared, or where it might in future be declared, governors and governors-general were not bound by the academic statement of general principles in the October manifesto, but were free to exercise discretionary power under the provisions of certain earlier decrees relating to "reinforced and extraordinary defense." These decrees, until repealed, were the law of the land, and they authorized and sanctioned every administrative measure to which the interpellations related, freedom manifestos to the contrary notwithstanding.[30]

The Czar's abandonment of the principles set forth in the freedom manifesto of October 30, 1905, put an end to what Mr. Milyukov has called "the ascending phase" of the Russian liberal movement. Count Witte, who had persuaded the Czar to sign the manifesto, was forced to retire from the Cabinet, and the new government, taking courage from the apparent loyalty of the army and the successful suppression of sporadic revolutionary outbreaks in various parts of the empire, returned gradually to the old policy of ruling by means of "administrative process," under the sanction of "exceptional" or "temporary" laws.

In July, 1906, when P. A. Stolypin was appointed Prime Minister, and when the first Duma was dissolved in order to prevent it from issuing an address to the people, the government abandoned even the pretense of acting in conformity with the principles laid down in the freedom manifesto, and boldly entered upon the policy of reaction and repression that it has ever since pursued. It now finds itself confronted by social and political problems of extraordinary difficulty and complexity, which are the natural and logical results of long-continued misgovernment or neglect. With the sympathetic cooeperation of a loyal and united people, these problems might, perhaps be solved; but in the face of the almost universal discontent caused by the Czar's return to the old hateful policy of arbitrary coercion and restraint, it is almost impossible to solve them, or even to create the conditions upon which successful solution of them depends.

Among the most serious and threatening of these problems is that presented by the steady and progressive impoverishment of the people. Russian political economists are almost unanimously of opinion that the condition of the agricultural peasants has been growing steadily worse ever since the emancipation.[31] As early as 1871, the well-known political economist Prince Vassilchikof estimated that Russia had a proletariat which amounted to five per cent. of the whole peasant population. In 1881, ten years later, the researches of Orlof and other statisticians from the zemstvos showed that this proletariat had increased to fifteen per cent., and it is now asserted by competent authority that there are more than twenty million people in European Russia who are living from hand to mouth, that is, who possess no capital and have not land enough to afford them a proper allowance of daily bread.[32] Four years ago, the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the "black-soil" province of Voronezh reported that in that thickly populated and once fertile part of the empire the net profits of the peasants' lands barely sufficed to pay their direct taxes. Of the 28,295 families in the district, only 14,328 had land enough to supply them with the necessary amount of food, while 13,967 were chronically underfed. Seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven families were unable to pay their taxes out of the net proceeds of their lands, even when they half starved themselves on a daily allowance of one pound and a third of rye flour per capita.[33] One might have expected the government to do something for the relief of a population suffering from such poverty as this, but, instead of aiding the sufferers, it punished the persons who called attention to the distress. One member of the Voronezh District Committee, Dr. Martinof, was exiled to the subarctic province of Archangel; two, Messrs. Shcherbin and Bunakof, were arrested and put under police surveillance; and two more, Messrs. Bashkevich and Pereleshin, were removed from their positions in the zemstvo and forbidden thenceforth to hold any office of trust in connection with public affairs.[34]

If the janitor of a tenement-house should notify the owner of the existence of a smoldering fire in the basement, and if the owner, instead of taking measures to extinguish the fire, should have the janitor locked up for giving information that might alarm the tenants and "unsettle their minds," we should regard such owner as an extremely irrational person, if not an out-and-out lunatic; and yet, this is the course that the Russian government has been pursuing for the past quarter of a century. Again and again it has closed statistical bureaus of the zemstvos, and in some cases has burned their statistics, simply because the carefully collected material showed the existence of a smoldering fire of popular distress and discontent in the basement of the Russian state. Now that the long-hidden fire has burst into a blaze of agrarian disorder, the government is trying to smother it with bureaucratic measures of relief, or to stamp it out with troops, military courts, and punitive expeditions; but the action comes too late. The economic distress which a quarter of a century ago was mainly confined to a few districts or provinces has now become almost universal. Long before the beginning of the recent agrarian disorders in the central provinces, a prominent Russian senator, who made an official tour of inspection and investigation in that part of the empire, described the condition of the peasants as follows:

"Among the indisputable evidences of progressive impoverishment among the peasants are the decreasing stocks of grain in the village storehouses, the deterioration of buildings, the exhaustion of the soil, the destruction of forests, the arrears of taxes, and the struggle of the people to migrate. In almost every village the penniless class is constantly growing, and, at the same time, there is a frightfully rapid increase in the number of families that are passing from comparative prosperity to poverty, and from poverty to a condition in which they have no assured means of support."

Scores if not hundreds of statements like this were made by the liberal provincial press, or by the district and provincial committees on agricultural needs; but, when the government paid any attention to them at all, it merely suspended or suppressed the newspapers for "manifesting a prejudicial tendency," or punished the committees for "presenting the condition of the people in too unfavorable a light."



A fair measure, perhaps, of the economic condition of a country is the earning capacity of its inhabitants, and, tried by this test, Russia stands far below the other civilized states of the world. According to a report made by S. N. Prokopovich to the Free Economic Society of St. Petersburg on May 2, 1907, the average annual income of the population per capita, in the United States and in various parts of Europe, is as follows:[35]

Country Average income per capita

United States $173.00 England 136.50 France 116.50 Germany 92.00 Servia and Bulgaria 50.50 Russia 31.50

It thus appears that the average American family earns nearly six times as much as the average Russian family, and that even in such comparatively backward and undeveloped parts of Europe as Servia and Bulgaria the average income of the population per capita is nearly twice that of Russia.

Another test of the economic condition of a country is its rate of mortality, taken in connection with the provision that it makes for the medical care and relief of its people. The death-rate of Russia—37.3 per thousand—is higher than that of any other civilized state, and, according to a report made by Dr. A. Shingaref to the Piragof Medical Congress in Moscow in May, 1907, the health of the population is more neglected than in any other country in Europe. The figures by which he proved this are as follows:[36]

Great Britain has one doctor to every 1,100 persons France " " " " " 1,800 " Belgium " " " " " 1,850 " Norway " " " " " 1,900 " Prussia " " " " " 2,000 " Austria " " " " " 2,400 " Italy " " " " " 2,500 " Hungary " " " " " 3,400 " Russia " " " " " 7,930 "

In connection with this report it may be noted that while Russia has only one physician to eight thousand people, there is one policeman to every nine hundred and one soldier to every one hundred and twelve.

This lack of physicians in Russia is mainly due to the extreme poverty of the mass of the people and their absolute inability to pay for medical attendance and care. With an earning capacity of only $31.50 per capita, or $189.00 per annum for a family of six, and with taxes that cut deeply into even this small revenue, the Russians cannot afford doctors. Shelter, food, and clothing they must have; but medical attendance is a luxury that may be dispensed with.

One of the principal causes of the impoverishment of the agricultural peasants in Russia is the insufficiency of their farm allotments. When the serfs were emancipated about forty-five years ago, they were not given land enough to make them completely independent of the landed proprietors, for the reason that the latter had to have laborers to cultivate their estates, and it was only in the emancipated class that such laborers could be found. Since that time the peasant population has nearly doubled, and an allotment that was originally too small adequately to support one family now has to support two. This increasing pressure of the growing population upon the land might have been met, perhaps, as it has been met in Japan, by intensive cultivation; but such cultivation presupposes education, intelligence, and adoption of improved agricultural methods; and the Russian government never has been willing to give its peasant class even the elementary instruction that would enable it to read and thus to acquire modern agricultural knowledge. In 1897, more than thirty years after the emancipation, the Russian percentage of illiteracy was still seventy-nine, and on January 1, 1905, only forty-two per cent. of the children of school age were attending school, as compared with ninety-five per cent, in Japan.[37] Intensive cultivation, moreover, involves high fertilization and the use of modern agricultural implements. The Russian peasants do not own live stock enough to supply them with the quantity of manure that intensive cultivation would require,—millions of them have no farm-animals at all,—and, with their earning capacity of only $31.50 a year per capita, they cannot afford to buy modern plows and improved agricultural machinery. If there were diversified industries in Russia, the agricultural peasants who are unable to maintain themselves on their insufficient allotments might find work to do in mills or factories; but Russia is not a manufacturing country, and her industrial establishments furnish only two per cent. of her population with employment.



Unable to get a living from their small and comparatively unproductive farms, and equally unable to find work elsewhere, the peasants clamor loudly for more land; and when, as the result of a bad harvest, their situation becomes intolerable, they are seized with a sort of berserker madness and break out into fierce bread riots, which frequently end in regular campaigns of pillage and arson. In 1905 they attacked and plundered the estates of more than two thousand landed proprietors and inflicted upon the latter a loss of more than $15,000,000. The disorder extended to one hundred and sixty-one districts and covered thirty-seven per cent. of the area of European Russia.

Such alarming evidences of wide-spread distress and discontent naturally forced the agrarian question upon the attention not only of the government but of the people's representatives in parliament. The Constitutional Democrats in the first Duma proposed to obtain more land for the common people by following the example set by Alexander II. when he emancipated the serfs, namely, by expropriating in part, and at a fixed price, the estates of the nobility, and selling the land thus acquired to the peasants upon terms of deferred payment extending over a long time. The government of Nicholas II., however, would not listen to this proposition, and the Stolypin ministry is now trying to satisfy the urgent need of the peasants by selling to them land that belongs to the state or the crown; by making it easier for them to buy land through the Peasants' Bank; and by facilitating emigration to Siberia, where there is supposed to be land enough for all. None of these measures, however, seems likely to afford more than partial and temporary relief. Most of the state and crown land in European Russia is not suitable for cultivation, or it is situated in northern provinces where agriculture is unprofitable on account of extremely unfavorable climatic conditions. According to Professor Maxim Kovalefski, the crown lands of European Russia comprise about 22,000,000 acres. Of the 4,933,000 acres that are arable and well located, 4,420,000 acres are already leased to the peasants upon terms that are quite as favorable as they could hope to obtain by purchase, and the remaining 513,000 acres would afford them no appreciable relief. In order to give them the same per capita allowance of land that they had at the time of the emancipation, it would be necessary to add about 121,000,000 acres to their present holdings, and no such amount of arable state or crown land is available.[38]

From the operations of the Peasants' Bank little more is to be expected. In the twenty years of its history it has bought about 17,000,000 acres from landed proprietors, but has disposed of only 3,600,000 acres to peasant communes. The rest it has sold to associations or land-speculating companies. The extreme need of the people, moreover, has so forced up the price of land in the black-soil belt as to make acquisition of it by the poorer class of peasants almost impossible. Between November 16, 1905, and August 31, 1906, the bank bought about 5,000,000 acres from landed proprietors, at an average price of $23.30 per acre, and resold it on bond and mortgage to individuals, companies, or peasant communes at an average rate of $24.44 per acre. Comparatively little of this land, however, went into the possession of the class that needed it most. The 4,997 peasant families in the district of Voronezh, who can make both ends meet only by limiting themselves to a per capita allowance of a pound and a third of rye flour a day, are not financially able to buy land at $24.44 per acre, and this is the economic condition of hundreds of thousands of families in the central provinces.[39]

Emigration to Siberia might have lessened the pressure of the growing population upon the land if it had been resorted to in time; but the government repeatedly put restrictions upon it, through fear that, if unchecked, it might result in depriving the landed proprietors of cheap labor. Count Dmitri Tolstoi, while Minister of the Interior, openly opposed it, and at one time the Russian periodical press was not allowed even to discuss it. When at last it was permitted, the bureaucracy managed it so badly, and paid so little attention to the distribution and proper settlement of the emigrants in Siberia, that nearly nineteen per cent. of them returned, practically ruined, to their old homes in European Russia. In the ten years from 1894 to 1903, 52,000 out of 304,000 emigrants came back from the crown lands in the Altai, one of the best parts of Siberia; and in the years 1901 and 1902 the percentages of returning emigrants were 53.9 and 68.1. In other words, more than half of the peasants who made a journey of fifteen hundred miles to the Altai came back simply because they could not satisfactorily establish themselves in the country where they had hoped to find more land and better conditions of life.[40]

If the government fails to relieve the land famine by selling its own land reserves, by making loans to the people through the Peasants' Bank, or by promoting emigration to Siberia, it will find itself threatened by two very serious dangers. On the one hand, the diminishing power of the peasants to pay taxes will ultimately affect the national revenue and impair the revenue of the state; and, on the other hand, the discontent and exasperation of the great class from which soldiers are drawn will sooner or later infect the army and lessen the power of the autocracy to enforce its authority. The government is now drafting about 460,000 recruits a year, and these conscripts not only share the feelings of the peasantry as a whole, but belong largely to the very class that has recently been in revolt. Tens of thousands of them either participated in or sympathized with the agrarian riots of 1905-6; and not a few of them, remembering how the troops were then sent against them, solemnly promised their fellow-villagers, when they joined the colors, that they would never fire upon their brothers, even if ordered to do so by the Czar himself. An army of this temper is a weapon that may become very dangerous to its wielders; and if the discontent and hostility of the peasants continue to increase with increasing impoverishment, and if the hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits carry their discontent and hostility into their barracks, the government may have to deal with mutinies and revolts much more serious than those of Cronstadt, Sveaborg, and the Crimea. Certain it is that an army is not likely to remain loyal when there is wide-spread disaffection in the population from which it is drawn; and in the present condition, temper, and attitude of the peasants we may find reasons enough for the "trouble to come" that Mr. Milyukov predicts.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Otherwise known as the "Black Hundreds." This reactionary and terroristic organization impudently pretended to represent the "true Russian people"; but in the election for the third Duma, when it had all the encouragement and help that the bureaucracy could give, it was able to send to the electoral colleges only 72 electors out of a total number of 5,160. It was composed mainly of the worst elements of the population, and derived all the power that it had from the support given to it by the bureaucracy and the police. Without such support it would have been stamped out of existence in a week by the liberals, revolutionists, and Jews, who were the chief objects of its attacks.

[28] This was the reply of the Czar to a telegram from the Union of True Russians thanking him for dissolving the second Duma and arresting fifty-five of its members on a charge of treason. Eight of these representatives of the people were afterward sentenced to five years of penal servitude, nine to four years of penal servitude, and ten to exile in Siberia as forced colonists. (Russian Thought, St. Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 216.)

When Mr. Milyukov returned to St. Petersburg after the delivery of his temperate and dispassionate address in New York, the handful of "true Russians" in the third Duma attacked him with violent and insulting abuse, and Mr. Vladimir Purishkevich, one of their most influential leaders, said to him in open session: "You are a poltroon and traitor, in whose face I would willingly spit!" Such is the spirit of the "true Russians" whom the Czar has asked to help him in bringing about "the peaceful regeneration of our great and holy Russia."