As to the "weight" of the new class, it increased prodigiously during the years following the war of 1870, thanks to the millions which the empire could invest in its industries and which allowed it to endow its commerce and its merchant marine, to complete the network of its roads, canals, and railways.

The law of concentration of capital was verified on this occasion in a striking manner. In the famous years 1871 to 1874, which the Germans call the Gruendejahre, the foundation years, gigantic industrial and commercial enterprises took a spring which seemed irresistible. A Director of the Deutsche Bank, of the Dresdener Bank, the President of a company for transatlantic commerce, such as the Hamburg-American Line, or of the committee of great electric establishments, enjoyed an influence in the councils of the State far greater than that of a Baron, a Count, or a little mediatized Prince.

What was the aristocracy of birth going to do about it? Struggle desperately? It took that tack at first. Bismarck ranged himself in its support for some time. He was himself an agrarian. But he was not long in installing paper mills on his estates at Varzin. It is said that the Emperor himself possesses porcelain factories. A part of the nobility for a long time tried to adapt itself to the new method of production. It took to it awkwardly and often ended in ruin.

Freytag has described this phenomenon at its beginnings in a romance which is a chef d'oeuvre. A part of the nobility yielded, fell into the hands of the financiers, the money lenders, the managers of agricultural enterprises, sold their lands, and took refuge in the great civil, administrative and military posts. The remainder resisted as well as they could. There was antagonism between their interests and those of the capitalists, between the religious and particularist tendencies on one hand and free thought and cosmopolitanism on the other. The agrarians demanded tariff duties on agricultural products to raise the price of their foodstuffs. The industrials wanted a low cost of living in order to avoid the rise of wages and to compete with better advantage for foreign markets.

Bismarck was the target for vehement opposition when he inclined toward the party of the traders and the industrials in his colonial and tariff policy. This evolution came about 1879. For a while the great Chancellor was looked upon almost as a traitor.

Nevertheless, his view was just. Balancing the forces on the one hand by those on the other, ceding protective duties first to one side and then to the other, offsetting the advantages which he offered to one side by the prerogatives which he accorded to the other, he finally succeeded in reconciling them.

From this reconciliation of the two dominant classes has resulted the extraordinary power of Germany. The bourgeois parties have from time to time grumbled over the military appropriations, but they have always voted them. And militarism, which is the support of the aristocracy, has been placed at the service of capitalistic ambition. By the prestige of force, awakening hopes here and inspiring fears there, more than once by the help of manoeuvres of intimidation, it has become an instrument of economic conquest.

Other combinations, other reciprocal interlacings, have taken place which have given an exceptional and unique character to contemporary Germany. It is a case of social psychology of extreme interest. To describe it would require long detail. The combination of the aristocratic and military tendency with the industrial and plutocratic tendency, the tendency of the police spirit, the regularizing spirit of the Kulturstaat with the individual initiative of the capitalist entrepreneur, methodical habits of administration with the love of risk characteristic of the speculator, all this constitutes imperialism, German imperialism, distinct from every other, because to a definite object, economic conquest, it adds another, less precise, in which the moral satisfaction dear to aristocracy, the pleasure of dominating, the love of displaying force, the tendency to prove one's own superiority to one's self, play a large part.

Economic conquest has become a necessity for Germany. Transformed into an industrial State, it no longer produces its own food. Since 1885 its imports have exceeded its exports by 1,353,000,000 marks. Whence did Germany derive these 1,300,000,000 marks which were needed, good year and bad, to meet its balance of trade? It owes them to its maritime commerce and the revenue of its capital invested abroad. Its maritime commerce then must augment and must triumph over all competition. At every cost it must open for itself outlets for its industrial products in order to buy foodstuffs which it does not produce sufficiently. If not, famine.

Let us see now how the complicated play of all these social forces and the effect of this economic situation have been embodied in formulas, what has been its intellectual expression.

This is no idle question, for men have always claimed to be guided by ideas, and generally they are, but they rarely know where their ideas come from or in what they consist. Without intellectual expression imperialism would not have extended to all the classes of society. The passion of economic conquest did not prevail throughout the whole of Germany. The bourgeois in the Liberal provinces, the corps of officers, the corps of teachers, the clergy were refractory to it. This direct form of imperialism does not seduce them. Not everybody can see his country and the universe through the eyes of an oligarch of high finance. A doctrine works with power when it appeals to instincts, when it awakens collective emotions, diverse enough in themselves, and joins them to each other with an appearance of logical deduction. It is not indispensable, but it is useful that it should borrow the language of the day. In the mediaeval epoch this language was religious. Beginning with the seventeenth century it was metaphysical. In our own time it is a scientific language set off by Greek words.

If the German philosophies of the second half of the nineteenth century are considered, there are not many of them that pass beyond the limit of the school. They are honest, scholarly productions elaborated by men who have read much, of whom some, like Wundt, are eminent specialists, but who have not conquered either their subjects or their readers. One feels that they are not of their century.

It is not from them, it is not from Eucken, the pleasant popularizer, it is not from Windelbund or Ostwald that the cultivated public sought the direction for its thought. To satisfy the need of general ideas which was everywhere felt, associations were formed, churches with or without God, of which a very important one was the "Monistenbund," in which Haeckel exploited his materialism transformed into a sort of biological pantheism.

But it was outside of the associations and outside of the school that the flame of creative genius burned brightly. The man of the last generation was Nietzsche. That his thought has been perverted by his interpreters there is no doubt. They have taken this eagle who gazed unblinded at the sun and exhibited him to the young people in all sorts of philosophic roles for the benefit of the industrial and military coalition. Nietzsche depicted in lines of fire the resurrection of heroism, his vision of the superman was that of an ardent soul, steeled by sufferings, meditating a tragic conception of life with serenity, and in his solitary individualism surmounting the infirmity of man and his own by the insistent will to eternal ascension.

He was made the apostle of brute force, a sort of Messiah of the "struggle for life." Moreover, he was soon put one side and Gobineau was revived. He also, who if he did not have genius had wit, would have been surprised and hardly flattered perhaps by the role which they made him play. The dolichocephalic (long-skulled) blonde whom he celebrated was not exactly the one whom we are now judging by his works, but at least he proclaimed the superiority of the German race.

His doctrine was the centre around which were gathered a complete ensemble of dogmas and of very diverse theories, whose connected thread it is not easy to discover when it is searched for logically, but appears quite distinctly when not reason, but reasons, are demanded. The reasons are found in the need of justifying in theory the economic and military imperialism, born as we have seen from conditions of fact and from very practical motives.

I do not pretend that it was calculated, nor that the optimates made express requisition of the naturalists, economists, and historians and sociologists and moralists to provide an imperialistic philosophy for the use of adult and normal dolichocephalous blondes. But there certainly was a coincidence. It may have been due to the influence of what is called a milieu ambiant, that of the commercial and military party. The authors of the doctrine lived in a special atmosphere. Their intellect was there formed—or deformed—their work consisted in gathering facts, inventing reasonings, elaborating formulas, so as to subject natural science, history and morality to the service of that keen will for hegemony which was in Germany the common characteristic and was the connecting link between the ancient and the new directing class.

To convince one that this is so, it is enough to arrange the works of the pan-Germanists in a series passing from the simplest to the most complicated. The dates are of no importance. We might put at one of the extremes the works of the Prussian General, von Bernhardi, and at the other the gigantic lucubration of a famous pan-German zealot, a neophite, a convert, almost a deserter, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Prof. Millioud examines at some length and acutely the tendencies and teachings of von Bernhardi, now familiar to American readers, sums up the work of the philosophers of minor rank and turns to Mr. Chamberlain.

With Mr. Chamberlain the thesis of vital competition, the morality of force, the judgment of history against little nations, the civilizing mission imposed upon greater Germany by its very greatness, by its economic, scientific and artistic superiority, everything tends to the glorification of the German, to his duty to govern the whole world which he feels so imperatively and which he accepts with such a noble simplicity. His work is not easily summarized, not only because it counts 1,379 pages and two appendices, but because all is in everything, and everything in the universe is also in Mr. Chamberlain's book. And the German has made everything. Not indeed the world; that he has only remade and is about to remake. But he has a way of remaking so creative that one might say that without him the Creator Himself would be a bit embarrassed. He has gathered to himself alone the heritage of Greece and Rome as far as it was worth anything. From the year 1200 to the year 1800 he founded, ripened, and saved a new civilization several times over. The mother of our sciences and our arts, Italy, is Germanic; the great architecture of the Middle Ages is Germanic; the true interpretation of Christianity, the true conception of art, the true social economy, the love of nature, the sense of individuality, the exploration of the world and of the soul, the great reawakenings of conscience, all the great flashes of thought are Germanic; everything is Germanic, except you and me, perhaps; so much the worse for me and so much the worse for you. After this book, the success of which has been prodigious, it would truly seem that there is nothing more to say. Germanic thought has appropriated the universe to itself. It only remained for the German sword to complete the work. It is drawn!

I have tried to describe the modifications, or rather the successive additions, by which the elementary themes disclosing economic, political, and military appetites in the directing class have been disguised as theories of biology, history, political economy, sociology, and morality. It would take another study or another article to show how science was perverted to such ends. The severity of methods, rigor in the determination of facts, precision in reasoning, prudence in generalization, serene impartiality and objectivity in verification, in a word the scientific spirit, cannot be bent to so many pleasant compromises without sacrificing a great part of its dignity and its title to respect.

This has been a singular and melancholy event for those of us who have been raised in respect for German science and in admiration for its methods, as well as for its discoveries. Certainly, from Liebig to Roentgen and to Behring, from Kant to Wundt, Germany has counted many distinguished pioneers. In the matter of fecund originality, however, and creative inspiration, Italy and France have always equaled, if not surpassed, her. She has had no Marconi, no Pasteur or Poincare, no Carrel.

What we have received from her so long that it has become almost a matter of instinct is less dazzling flashes than an equal and constant light. And the savants, the university men who bring to us anthropological romances, history stuffed with legends and personal prejudices, sociology constructed in contempt of the facts!

In these later days we have seen all these joining under the guidance of their most illustrious members to address the civilized nations in an appeal in which by virtue of their quality as savants they undertook to pronounce upon facts which they don't understand, to deny those which they cannot help understanding, and solemnly to declare that it is not true that Germany has violated the neutrality of the territory of Belgium. For proof of this, nothing but their word of honor. Do they take us for those young gentlemen who said to Monge, "Professor, give us your word of honor that this theorem is true and we will excuse you from the demonstration of it"?

Fully to explain the role of the intellectual savants and university men in the formation of the ideology of caste which prevails among the Germans it would be necessary to recite the history of instruction in Germany, not such as Davis and Paulson have written it, but such as it actually is under the influence of institutions and programmes—I mean the moral history of instruction.

The great Frederick was wont to cry, "I commence by taking; afterward I shall always have pedants enough to establish my rights." Pedants or not, the members of the teaching corps of every grade in Germany are a wheel of the State, their mission is to form not men, but Germans, to inculcate the national idea. Their views have penetrated even to the common people.

Germany receives a double education—that of the school and that of the barracks. The spirit of these two institutions is the same, and their influence, which has been exercised since 1848 in opposition to humanitarian and internationalist ideas, has encountered no serious obstacles, for it went readily with certain old instincts which it was not difficult to reawaken and which general circumstances favored.

"Latrocinia nullam habent infamiam," said Caesar, speaking of the Germans. Pillage brings no shame. This desire of gain, this positive and realistic tendency is one of the motives which the brusque and prodigious economic expansion of Germany has promoted in the most efficient manner.

This total assimilation of a people of 70,000,000 of souls by an aristocratic, almost a feudal, directing class, a combination of plutocrats and militarists, is in reality a most curious phenomenon, more than curious, in a sense grandiose, and in any case full of suggestions and menaces.

Surrender of body and soul, confidence almost religious, enthusiastic faith, the directing class has conquered everything within in order to conquer everything without. Now it stakes everything upon the cast of the dice. I have not undertaken to decide whether it is just or not. The event will determine whether it is genius or madness.



THE LAND OF MAETERLINCK

By Alfred Sutro

[From King Albert's Book.]

I have translated many books of Maeterlinck's; I have wandered with him among the canals of Bruges and the fragrant gardens of Ghent; I have seen the places where he dreamed of Pelleas and Melisande, and the hives of the bees he loved. Through him I learned to know Belgium, today all the world knows. Her cities are laid waste now and her people scattered, but her people will return and rebuild the cities, and the enemy will be dust. The day will come when the war will be far distant, a thing of the past, remote, forgotten, but never, while men endure or heroism counts, will it be forgotten what the Belgians did for Liberty's sake and for the sake of Albert, their King.



America and Prohibition Russia

Two Mustard Seeds of Reform Carried From This Land to the Steppes

By Isabel F. Hapgood

When Russia recently abolished the sale of liquor, first in the shops run as a Government monopoly, and, after a brief experience of the beneficent results, in the restaurants and clubs as well, an astonished and admiring world recognized the measure as one of the greatest events in the moral history of a nation. It takes rank with the reforms of Peter the Great. It almost casts into the shade the emancipation of the serfs.

There has always existed in Russia a strong party which severely disapproved of Peter precisely because he forced "Western" ideas upon them. Their idea has always been that Russia would have developed a far higher degree of genuine culture and far more precious spiritual qualities had she been left to the promptings of her own genius and its "healthy, natural" development. And there are, indubitably, persons scattered through the vast Russian Empire who entertain parallel opinions with regard to the total prohibition of liquor just effected, and with regard to the projected change in the calendar now assumed to be imminent. I trust that I shall not increase their numbers to dangerous proportions if I call attention to the fact that these reforms have also, like Peter the Great's ideas, been imported from the West—from the Far West, the United States. I am sure my fellow-countrymen will be gratified to learn the truth, and I cheerfully accept the risk, and assume that Russia will, in all probability, remain ignorant of my interference!

It is true that we do not have actual, effective prohibition anywhere here in America, and that we do not seem to be within measurable distance of such an achievement; that Russia has distanced us again in this, just as she distanced us by emancipating her serfs, without a war, before we emancipated our slaves, with the aid of a war. But we have supplied the scriptural mustard seed in the case of prohibition in Russia, and have either furnished the seed for the change in the calendar, or, at any rate, have provided elements that have hastened its growth to a very remarkable degree.

Mustard seed No. 1 was carried over from the United States in the Autumn of 1887 and sown on the good ground of the late Count Tolstoy, and other noble men, whence—as results show—it spread abroad with a swiftness suggestive rather of the proverbial weed than of the fair flower its blossoming has shown it to be.

In the Autumn of 1886 Dr. Peter Semyonovitch Alexyeeff of Moscow, accompanied by his wife, sailed for Canada and the United States for the purpose of inspecting the hospitals, prisons, and elementary schools; and they came for the Winter because some parts of Canada during that season possess a climate similar to that of Central Russia, while in other parts the climates are identical. In fact, Canada is the only country in the world where the climatic conditions are at all analogous. The construction of new hospitals, the adaptation of already existing buildings for hospital use, the internal arrangement, and the perfection of their internal machinery had long been matters of deep interest to Dr. Alexyeeff.

Germany and France, with climates so different from that of Russia, could not furnish him with the information available in North America, where, in his opinion, the habits and conditions of existence—such important factors in matters connected with hospitals and invalids—also differ less from those of Russia than do the general surroundings in the countries of the Continent. After visiting the principal cities of Canada and the United States from Quebec to Vancouver, and from Boston to Washington, (some of them more than once,) Dr. Alexyeeff arrived at the conclusion that the hospitals of the United States were better built and much better administered than those of London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.

Naturally, no one could spend nine months in investigating hospitals and prisons in this country without coming in contact with the liquor problem. Moreover, Dr. Alexyeeff was a wideawake man, who took an interest not only in all matters connected with his profession, but in very many outside of it. He was, also, a man of very lofty character. His wife once wrote me concerning him somewhat as follows: "He walks, habitually, on such moral heights, in such a rarefied spiritual atmosphere, that I, the daughter of an English clergyman, reared accordingly, and myself (as you know) deeply in sympathy with it, find difficulty in following him." Obviously, he was precisely the man to appreciate the temperance movement, and to carry it to its logical conclusion. In the preface to a volume, "About America," which he published in Moscow in 1888, he writes:

Neither the wonders of wild nature in the Rocky Mountains nor the menacing might and grandeur of Niagara produce such an impression on a Russian as the success of the fight with drunkenness—the temperance movement—and the successful development, in all classes of society, of morality and the strict application of practical morals.

He did not confine himself to this brief, general statement. He wrote in praise of temperance, of prohibition, for learned Russian societies. Then he wrote a book entitled "Concerning Drunkenness." The Censor's permit to publish is dated March 29, (April 10,) 1887. It was published by the management of the magazine, Russkaya Mysl, (Russian Thought,) which may indicate that it had first appeared in that monthly as a series of articles, though I have not been able to verify the fact. The book may have been published promptly, or at least the article from the medical magazine may have been published in the cheap form (costing two or three cents) used by the semi-commercial, semi-philanthropic firm "Posrednik," which may be rendered "Middleman" or "Mediator," designed for the dissemination of good and useful reading among the masses.

At any rate, "Concerning Drunkenness" appeared at the price of one ruble (about fifty cents) in 1891, prefaced by a dissertation by Count Tolstoy, "Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?" specially written for this occasion, as Dr. Alexyeeff told me. (It has been translated under the title of "Alcohol and Tobacco," London, and published without any indication that Dr. Alexyeeff inspired it.)

In 1896 a second edition, revised and enlarged, was published, also in Moscow; and to this the author added a list of helpful publications and a summary bibliography, which included books issued in various foreign countries, ranging in number from 705 for Great Britain and Colonies, 142 for the United States, 247 for Germany, 124 for ten other countries combined, (up to 1885 in all these cases,) to ten for Russia. Of these ten, four are in Latin, four in German, one is in Swedish and one in Russian—the latter, evidently, an article republished from The Medical News. On the whole, a list practically non-existent, so far as Russia was concerned!

Dr. Alexyeeff had discovered a field of endeavor as virgin as the unplowed steppe. Only scientists desperately hard up for an unusual topic for a strictly academic discussion and recklessly willing to risk incurring universal unpopularity would have dreamed of unearthing those volumes. He promptly aroused Count Tolstoy's interest in the subject of temperance, which in this case signified prohibition, since the Count in his preface to Dr. Alexyeeff's book (dated July 10-22, 1890,) treated liquor on the same basis as tobacco, which he had totally abjured at least two years previously. With Tolstoy, to become convinced that a reform was desirable was, as all the world knows, to become an ardent propagandist of that reform. Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Alexyeeff, seconded by those of Tolstoy, temperance began to attract attention in Russia, temperance societies were formed, and have been steadily increasing ever since in numbers and activity.

Eventually Mr. Tchelisheff arrived on the scene with his splendid vital force and practical solutions of the financial and other problems (or suggestions for them) that arise from prohibition, (especially when a Government monopoly and revenue are concerned,) which he most strenuously advocated when Mayor of Samara, as representative in the Duma—everywhere, in fact, where he could obtain a hearing, willing or unwilling, up to the Emperor Nicholas himself. And the Emperor showed that he was equal to the magnificent opportunity, and joined hands with the former peasant in aiding his country.

In an interview published by THE TIMES a while ago Mr. Tchelisheff mentions that his attention was first drawn to the subject of the evils of drunkenness by a book which he saw a muzhik reading. Judging from the point at which he inserts that mention into his outline sketch of his career (previous to the great famine which he—erroneously—assigns to the "end of the '80s," but which came in 1891) his interest was aroused precisely at the time when Dr. Alexyeeff's first utterances may be assumed to have seen the light of print. At any rate, it is an admitted fact that Dr. Alexyeeff carried to Russia and to Tolstoy from the United States the idea and inspiration which has borne such wonderful fruit in the abolition of the liquor traffic "forever," as the Imperial ukase runs.

Mr. Tchelisheff is a noteworthy figure in history accordingly, but Dr. Alexyeeff should not be forgotten. When I made his acquaintance at Count Tolstoy's, in Moscow, he had just requested (and obtained) a detail of service in Tchita, Trans-Baikal Province, Siberia, as physician to the political exiles there, thinking the region would repay study from many points of view, in his leisure hours. The preface to the first edition of his book "Concerning Drunkenness" is dated "July, 1899, Tchita," and from Tchita I received my copy from him. In that preface he states the scope of his book in a way which confirms my conviction that Mr. Tchelisheff was first stirred to interest, and in the end aroused to action, by the United States, via Dr. Alexyeeff. He writes:

The battle which in all ages has been waged against drunkenness has been confined hitherto almost exclusively to the realms of medicine and ethics; the social part of the question is only just beginning to be worked out, and has hardly as yet won the rights of citizenship, and down to our own day there have been no serious legal measures adopted for the battle with drunkenness.

Therefore, he omits the legal aspects of the matter in his book and confines himself to an attempt at popularizing the information scattered in divers individual books, "borrowing everything which can lead to the ultimate goal—the extermination of the evil caused by the use of spirituous drinks." He continues:

Public opinion has nowhere as yet, even in the lands where considerable success has attended the war on drunkenness, ripened sufficiently a desire to give, even incompletely, a summary of the information about that battle, and make my fellow-countrymen acquainted with a matter still little known in Russia, so I am prompted to write what follows.

The second edition of this book, with the surprising list of Russian treatises on drunkenness to which I have already alluded, is dated "June, 1895, Riga," where he lived after his return from Siberia, as an official of the Government medical service, until his death in August, 1913. During the stay in Tchita of the Alexyeeffs, the present Emperor (then the heir,) passed through it, on his way home (from the trip to India and Japan which came so near terminating fatally in the latter country) after having officially opened work upon the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. A formal reception and ceremonies were organized in Tchita; and I allude to the matter because of a curious detail mentioned in a letter to me by Mrs. Alexyeeff. Foreigners have very queer ideas, she said, as to the position and treatment of the political exiles in Siberia; some of the Tchita exiles served as heads of the committees for welcoming the heir, and he shook hands with them and treated them exactly as he treated the Governor General of the Province.

Whether it was his admiration for the American temperance movement which influenced Dr. Alexyeeff's views on everything American, I cannot say. But, assuredly, not many foreign visitors have pronounced upon our country such a panegyric as is contained in the preface to his "Across America." He writes:

Conscientious fulfillment of every duty, industry, energy, and moral purity are the typical qualities of the genuine American. It is difficult to form any idea of the wide development of philanthropy, the significance of religion, and the practical application to life of ethical principles, the application of moral obligations in business, the upright, God-fearing life of the Americans, unless one has lived among them. They have neither prostitution, foundling hospitals, nor hospitals for venereal diseases. A European is not accustomed to see empty prisons and hospitals in densely settled localities—to come upon cities where there is nothing for the police, the Judges, and the doctors to do he finds startling. They have attained the height where priests, pastors, preachers, and teachers are rarely obliged to contend with indifference....

After a trip to America it would be difficult to return an atheist—you are more likely to come back in a religious frame of mind.... Idleness and luxury are not among the distinguishing characteristics of the descendants of the Puritans.... In the light, transparent atmosphere of the States, simplicity, the cheerful, alert spirit infects the foreigner, makes him a more frank, trustful, optimistic warrior for the truth, and causes him to forget what it means to be downcast in spirit, or what spleen and hypochondria are.

Until he died, in Siberia, in Russia, everywhere, Dr. Alexyeeff worked for temperance. He was enthusiastic about it when I saw him and his wife in England, in 1907.

Mr. Tchelisheff having been aroused to interest, theoretically, by America, via Dr. Alexyeeff, as is fairly proven, it was only natural that he should proceed to make the personal observations on the practical, social side of drunkenness which he mentions in his Times interview. He noticed, during the great famine of 1891, that it was the drunkards who had squandered their grain and pawned their possessions to the keepers of the dramshops who robbed other men's granaries and houses, burned, rioted, and murdered; while the men who did not drink had plenty of food and grain to hold out. We are informed from Russia that even during its still brief reign prohibition has resulted in remarkable improvement in health, living conditions, and bank accounts.

Mr. Tchelisheff is, as I have said, a noteworthy figure in history. He would be a remarkable figure in any land; but for those who are not acquainted with Russia, the rise of a man born a peasant, educated solely by his own efforts on stray newspapers and books which fell in his way in his schoolless village, and absolutely lacking in money or influence, ("svyazi"—connections, is the Russian version of "pull,") to the position of multi-millionaire and co-worker with the Emperor, is amazing almost beyond belief. In reality, it is as simple as the rise of an American newsboy, of an Edison or a Carnegie to a position of power in the United States. Fate, circumstances, as well as their own personality are the factors in all these cases; and in every similar case.

Moreover, there is in Russia no eternally impassable barrier of caste, but there is a genuine democracy which is not easy to define, but is very easily felt. For instance, the title of "Prince," (to which, unlike that of "Count" or "Baron"—conferrable—one must be born, runs the rule, with exceptions for such national heroes as Suvaroff,) counts for nothing or approximately that, unless its owner possesses, in addition, the wealth, character, learning or other characteristics which would render him a man of mark without it.

There are other interesting instances of peasants who have risen high in Russia, and Mr. Tchelisheff is their worthy successor. The founder of the great silversmiths' firm of Ovtchinnikoff was a serf. His successors have made it their rule, "out of gratitude to God," to maintain and educate a certain number of poor boys, who, when their intellectual and technical training is completed, are free to remain with the firm as valued artists or to go forth independently. When the Emperor Alexander II. celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession to the throne, all the Sovereigns of Europe sent him magnificent presents. These are assembled in his library, at the Winter Palace, Petrograd; and in the centre—accorded that place by the Russians with equal good feeling, good taste, and justice—is a large group in solid silver, representing a huge mass of rock upon whose pinnacles stand figures representing the different parts of the empire—Little Russia, Siberia, and so forth. The inscription reads: "To the Tzar-Liberator from the Liberated Serf." It was made by the Ovtchinnikoffs and presented by another ex-serf, who had become a millionaire railway magnate.

Mustard Seed No. 2 from America to Russia falls into a somewhat different category. It more nearly resembles one of those grains of antique wheat found in a tomb and sprouting vigorously when finally planted in congenial, helpful soil. I trust that my comparison may not be regarded as disrespectful. One could not, willingly, be disrespectful to the calendar, any more than to the thermometer!

Russia, by adhering to the Julian Calendar and refusing to adopt the Gregorian, has now fallen thirteen days behind the rest of the world. It falls behind about a day for every century. There are several reasons why Russia has not, up to now, remedied the serious inconvenience caused by this conflict of dates. One is—the Gregorian Calendar is Roman Catholic, and named after a Pope. It is, also, inaccurate. Worst of all, the rectification might—almost infallibly would, under ordinary circumstances—cause trouble at the outset, especially in one incalculably important direction.

Russian scientists long ago worked out a new calendar far more accurate than the Gregorian for thousands of years, and when the change is made that calendar will be adopted. The fundamental difficulty lies in the fact that all the people whose saints' days must inevitably be skipped for the first year in the process of rectification will inevitably feel that they are being robbed of their guardian angels, that they are "orphans"—a mournful word greatly beloved of the Russian masses under multiform circumstances, both material and spiritual—and orphaned in a peculiarly distressing and irrevocable way. They might even feel when their saints' days came around quite correctly the next year that some spurious adventurer—Angel of Darkness—was being foisted upon them.

Fanatics and professional mischief-makers would certainly seize with avidity upon such a godsend of a chance, unparalleled since the days of Peter the Great's father, when the Patriarch Nikon had the errors of the copyists in the Scriptures and church service books corrected. But the present war has fused all parties, united all hearts in patriotism, loyalty to, and confidence in their Emperor and created a fervid inclination amounting to enthusiasm to accept even the most drastic reforms he may make cheerfully, unquestionably, as for the good of the fatherland.

On the matter of the calendar reform America has for many years past been exerting a steadily increasing influence. During the past twenty years the steady flow of immigrants from Russia and other countries belonging to the Orthodox Catholic Church of the East, (Greco-Russian,) has increased to a great volume, and it seems destined to attain still greater proportions when the war is over. These people are obliged to work and keep holiday by the Gregorian calendar and to worship by the Julian. This entails hardships.

For example, a devout Russian who has been forced to remain idle on our Christmas and New Year's Days must sacrifice his pay—sometimes risk or lose his job—if he wishes to observe the feasts of his own church. A reform of the calendar would be hailed with joy by innumerable such immigrants, who have been over here long enough to consider calmly the practical aspects of a temporary dislocation of saints' days. The ecclesiastical authorities in this country have frequently protested, in print, both here and in Russia, and I have been informed that the Holy Synod has been appealed to, more than once, to induce it to cast its influence into the balance with that of the scientists and the governmental authorities, who have been discussing the matter for years past, and hesitating over the probable consequences of action—a case of peasant joining hands with the rulers of Russia, once more like Mr. Tchelisheff and the Emperor Nicholas—or the people of the United States and the President—to secure a needed reform!

And these same peasant-immigrants in America have, without the shadow of a doubt, already written back to their relatives and friends in the old country—and very frequently—about the difficulties of the antiquated Julian calendar, and these, in turn, can disseminate common sense about the change in a way which the Government, aided by the Holy Synod and the explanations of home-staying parish priests, unaided, could never effect. When the fitting time arrives, perhaps the Russian Government will avail itself of just this argument, among others—the welfare of friends in distant America. There has never been a propitious time in Russia to make that calendar reform since the reign of Peter the Great until now. And America may fairly be said to have brought from its dark hiding place the mustard seed which has been trying so long to germinate, and imparted to it a vivifying impulse.



THE MOTHER'S SONG.

By CECILIA REYNOLDS ROBERTSON.

Hush, oh, my baby, your father's a soldier, He's off to the war, and we've nothing to eat. And the glory is neither for you nor for me, With the cockleburr crushing the wheat.

Little boy baby, look well on your mother; Some day you may ask why she bore you at all; For the trenches are foul with the blood and the wallow, And the bayonet is sharp for your fall.

Rest, rosy limbs, and blue eyes and gold lashes— Made in the mold of the Saviour, they say! Drink deep of my bosom, my starved, meagre bosom, That—keeps you alive for the fray.

Sleep, oh, my man child, and smile in your sleeping, But the gun has been fashioned to lay in your hand, And your life blood flows smooth in your fair little body The better to water and plenish the land!



Pan-American Relations As Affected by the War

Consequences of the European Conflict on Future Commerce Between the United States and Latin America

By Huntington Wilson,

Formerly Assistant Secretary of State.

I.

A study of the effects of the war upon our relations with the other republics of this hemisphere involves political, commercial, financial and strategic elements of far-reaching scope and much complexity. The situation presents an opportunity. It offers a lesson even more vital than the opportunity. The political considerations are most relevant to the lesson; and the final text of the lesson will be the result of the war. The economic opportunity is already upon us, definite and clear. It will not wait. It must be grasped without delay and may therefore be first discussed.

There is something repellent in counting our advantages under the shadow of so great a tragedy but we must try to be as practical as those who are fond of accusing us of materialism. Does any one think that the steam-roller of admirably organized and Government-fostered German competition would pause if we lay in the road; that if we received a check, Anglo-Saxon cousinship and fair play would always mitigate British competition; or that then not a single European merchant in South America would ever again use scorn and detraction against our goods, or encourage, through influence with the press, prejudice due to "Yankee peril" nonsense? In short, is it likely that all our competitors would suddenly love us just because we were in trouble? No, things are not as they should be and meanwhile must be dealt with as they are.

There used to be apparently very little hope of our shaking the tree and gathering the golden fruit of foreign enterprise unless forced to it by the collapse, through dire hard times, of the wonderful home market which has made spoiled children of our manufacturers. Now comes this war. It forces upon us a wonderful, a unique opportunity to gain and hold our proper place in the finance, trade, and enterprise of Latin America. The richness of the field is often exaggerated, but its cultivation is certainly worth the effort of men of foresight.

What are we going to do about it? This is the question; for if American business men do not do their part the ultimate effect of the war upon our economic interests in this part of the world will be unimportant. We must not be like the young gold miners who were looking exclusively for large nuggets with handles. We must go at it seriously and scientifically and solidly, not superficially, casually, and opportunistically. We must begin with the earnest intention of continuing our efforts for all time.

An enthusiastic commercial spasm will be worth nothing. There have got to be real efforts, real hard work, the expenditure of money for future and not merely immediate profits, a cheerful readiness to discard old and cherished methods, a new adaptability, a new painstaking attention to details. There has got to be serious study of foreign countries and keen interest in our relations to them. Without all this, mailing catalogues, (usually in English,) banquets and speeches and organizations will take us nowhere.

American business men are bestirring themselves. They know that we need ships to carry our goods advantageously, and banks for the favorable financing of our trade. They should be able to compel our Government's support where needful, as in a ship subsidy or a limited guarantee of reasonable profit to American investment in ships. In connection with our efforts at Caribbean commerce, as another instance, they should be able to get a flexible sliding scale tariff provision passed by Congress, so that, in dealing with the countries whose coffee or other special products we buy, we could induce them to give us for our exports reciprocal advantages over our competitors. Indeed, a kind of Caribbean tariff union might well be feasible and desirable.

So long ago as last August the British Government sent all over the world for samples and specifications of German goods which their manufacturers might contrive to displace. We should take corresponding action in regard to the goods of our competitors. Our manufacturers should be reconciled to sending to find out what each market wants instead of asking a population to take or leave what we make. Our commercial campaign should include the effort to replace goods from one belligerent country formerly handled by local merchants from another belligerent country, such as British goods previously sold through the German houses which so abound in these countries.

Good men from small countries without political significance in world-politics already make their influence felt as employes of foreign Governments and as merchants in foreign countries. The war may set free many more men and send them about the world to work for their own interests, for the country they most believe in, and perhaps ultimately for an adopted country. International commerce must have its courtiers, and the good will of all such men should also be reckoned with. They spread friendship or prejudice against us. Many of them are importers and will push our goods or some one else's according to the manner in which we deal with them.

American manufacturers are doubtless weary of being told that they pack badly, that they are niggardly about credits, that they do not send enough or sufficiently qualified representatives, that they are careless of details, and so on. Still, before mentioning some further particular steps that should be taken, it is necessary to emphasize the fact that these same old faults are, and until corrected must remain, the chief detriments to our foreign trade.

In some of the republics there is a real disposition to deal with us; in others there is a preference for Europe. Now, as to many goods, they must deal with us or go without, although I am informed that a German firm, for example, has got word to its clients in these countries that it is prepared to fill orders via Copenhagen. If we think that our competitors have gone entirely or permanently out of business we shall be ridiculously and sadly disappointed. We shall be on trial, and if our exporters make good they will find a conservative disposition to continue to buy from us.

In the effort it is important to remember that there is much to live down in criticism of methods of the past. One Latin-American gentleman, an enthusiast for American commerce, exclaimed to me in despair: "Son hombres capazes de poner una hacha Collins con vidrios para ventanas," which means: "they (the American exporters) are capable of packing a Collins hatchet with window glass." Others told me how leading firms always stamped their letters for domestic and not foreign postage. The office boy simply would not learn geography. Nobody minded paying the deficit, but through local red tape this seeming trifle sometimes caused two or even three weeks' delay in the delivery of important letters.

Certain of our strongest firms have been calmly ignoring shipping directions. What did they care if the packages had to cross the Andes on mule back, and if mules could only carry packages of a certain size and weight? What did they care if the duty remission for materials on some Government contract, or the customs classification of a shipment, depended on adherence to specific directions? I could multiply examples of the most amazing casualness and careless disregard, of bad packing, of ungenerous credit, which have enraged the importer.

A European merchant, many years established in a South American city, and knowing the community, has been selling pianos in this way: The manufacturer would quote him a price and deliver the piano, giving him long credit at an ordinary rate of interest. The merchant would finally sell the piano on the installment plan, receiving interest at a higher rate on the deferred payments, the merchant trusting the buyer, the manufacturer trusting the merchant, both thus making good profits, and the purchaser being accommodated. This man found the American manufacturer entirely unwilling to deal in this way.

European houses on the spot, whether independent or financed by large home houses, give credits for as long, sometimes, as a year. They would not continue to do so if they lost by doing it. Often this fits the customs of the local domestic trade. In one country the local retailer is expected to be paid within eighteen months. Naturally, our exporters' demand for "cash down on receipt of documents," even when the customer is well vouched for, does not appeal to him.

He prefers to get long credit from a European house, and pay interest for it, rather than to borrow from his bank at high interest or sink his own capital to pay for American goods, long before he gets them, their price plus the profit of a commission house. Indeed, he is generally dissatisfied with the methods of American export trade as now conducted, which is almost exclusively through commission houses. These, it seems, might become more efficient through organization and more aggressive and scientific methods.

On the other hand, the export trade of certain of the big combinations is beginning to be pushed with commendable zeal and efficiency. Trade at large, to reach its greatest volume, must include the pushing of smaller lines of goods. These smaller lines, in the aggregate, would reach considerable sums, and it does not appear that there have hitherto existed efficient agencies for their marketing. To hold Latin-American trade we must equal our competitors in liberality of credits, in representation on the spot, and in other facilities.

There is no doubt that more American merchants resident in the trade centres would give valuable impetus to our commerce. Even our commission houses operating on the spot are so few that in handling many lines there is the greatest danger of their sacrificing the building up of a steady trade to the opportunities of unduly heavy profits now and then, and so damaging our general commercial interests. Then we must send many commercial travelers.

Just here, however, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that Americans sent to these countries to do business must above all be men of agreeable manners. In these countries many quite unworthy people have these: so a good man who lacks them is likely to be badly misjudged. They should have sympathetic personality and sufficient education, besides being men of sobriety and good character, and should be able to speak the language of the country.

All this will be expensive, but non-competing firms might join in sending men, or competing firms might, it is hoped, be guaranteed against the terrors of the Sherman law in order to join in sending a corps of representatives upon some basis of division of the field or the profits. Combination is even more necessary abroad to put forth the nation's strength in world competition than it is for efficiency at home. These men would be students and salesmen, and perhaps future merchants who would settle in these countries and emulate the patriotic groups of resident foreigners who in so many places help to form an atmosphere favorable to their countries' interests.

They would work to replace with our goods those now shut off by the war, but also to introduce dozens of lines of American products which are now comparatively hard to find in these markets. A number of strong firms might join to establish commercial houses or selling agencies in trade centres of certain groups of countries. Commission houses might do the same if they carried samples and instructed their clients in packing, credits, &c., but in each case there should be American houses on the spot which would carry general lines and supply to the eye that visible evidence of the goods themselves which is such a valuable form of advertisement.

In the establishment of American houses in these countries, as in many other respects, much may be learned from the Germans. They bring out carefully selected young men. These, if efficient, have sure promotion. The partners retire before old age to make room for those who work up. The inefficient are dropped. It is a little like the principle of a good foreign service.

I think the most minute study should be given, first, to the nearer countries, say those north of the Equator, including the republics of the Caribbean. Each country must be separately studied. Primarily, there will be found a cry, sometimes desperate, for capital. Public works, concessionary and otherwise, have stopped for lack of funds from Europe. New developments in railroad building, mining, harbor works, plantations, are arrested. Where European credits have been customarily used to handle crops, there is distress, and no less so in cases in which such credit has previously been given by ostensibly American houses operating really with European capital.

American capital may come to the rescue by advances upon good security through local banks. It can establish banks or buy controlling interests in existing banks, many of which pay their stockholders 15 per cent. or more. It can relieve the stagnation and make profitable investment by an active campaign for public and private contracts and for sound and fair concessions, not visionary or get-rich-too-quick schemes.

Supposably, the repairing of the destruction brought by the war will make European capital scarce for some years, but an effort will doubtless be made to retain for it its former preponderance in these countries; and so it is important that, whatever the war's effects upon our own money markets, use should be made of such an opportunity as does not come more than once.

To be sure, the scarcity of money in the United States makes this difficult, but the same worldwide money scarcity will secure an especially high rate of interest in Latin America, where even in normal times money can often be placed on excellent security in some of the countries, and at a rate very high indeed compared to that prevailing now in the United States. For safe investments with such a margin of profit, it is to be hoped that money, even if dear at home, will be forthcoming.

Undoubtedly the purchasing power of these republics has been hard hit by the cutting off of credits and markets by the war, as their Governments have been hard hit through the falling off of revenues from import duties. Some of the Governments will require foreign loans. Capital, I repeat—and I mean really American capital—is the urgent need. We are not asked to make them a present of capital to buy our goods with, but if we do not help finance them and buy their products they will have nothing with which to buy our goods.

The situation invites us to give capital and credit to take the place of the European supply which has failed. One need not fear that the returns will be uninviting, for Europe would hardly have been supplying credit and capital to Latin America as a mere matter of amiability. Thus our capital must regenerate Latin-American prosperity, while our bankers, merchants, and manufacturers are engaged in making solid, permanent arrangements, not opportunistic ones, to take possession of a great share in the present and still more in the growing future development and commerce of these countries. Capital, then, and credit are the first requisites.

The war has had the effect of making the Latin-American countries realize for once the economic importance to them of the United States. The products of some, like the tin of Bolivia and the nitrates of Chile, have been going almost entirely to Europe. Several republics suffer the more acutely in proportion to their previous failure to cultivate financial and commercial relations with the United States.

They now feel this and are compelled to a mood receptive to our advances. More, they are forced to seek new markets for their goods just as they are forced to buy some of ours. In this way there should come about new exports to the United States, and there should spring up there the corresponding new industries and habits of consumption, to the ultimate benefit of all the countries concerned.

Meanwhile, the United States is the only present economic hope of a number of the republics. It is to be hoped that our capitalists and business men will realize the responsibilities as well as the opportunities of profit in the role they are asked to play, and that their response to their new opportunities will be one of courage, thoroughness and intelligence, and one also of quiet patriotism.

II.

POLITICAL POTENTIALITIES.

Turning from the opportunity to the lesson, from the commercial and economic aspects of this question to those that are political in the large sense, one's imagination is appalled at the potentialities of the yet unknown results of so vast an upheaval. Yet we must envisage some of these if we are to be prepared for their effect upon us. We must be ready for the impact of the resultant forces of these great dynamics. We must be ready everywhere, but nowhere more than in our relations with Latin America, in the zone of the Caribbean, and wherever the Monroe Doctrine as still interpreted gives us a varying degree of responsibility.

The war's first effect upon our Latin-American relations is to compel through commercial and financial rapprochement a larger measure of material interdependence, more contact, and, we may hope, a substitution of knowledge for the former reciprocity of ignorance. All this makes for better social and intellectual relations, good understanding and friendship, and so for political relations much more substantial in the case of many of the republics than the rather flimsy Pan-Americanism celebrated in eloquent speeches and futile international conferences.

There is little in Pan-Americanism of that kind. The "raza Latina" of eloquence is not itself homogeneous; still less so is the population of the whole hemisphere. And with Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Santiago we have, of course, far less propinquity than we have with the capitals of Europe. But what we really can do is to build up, especially with the nearer republics, real ties of common interest and good neighborhood, and with the distant ones ties of commerce and esteem.

The war may tend to cure certain rather self-centred countries of affecting the morbid view that the people of the United States are lying awake nights contriving to devour them, when, in fact, it would be hard to find in a crowded street in the United States one in a thousand of the passersby who knew more than the name, at most, of one of those very few countries referred to.

Europe's preoccupation with the war temporarily deprives such a country and its few misguided prophets whose monomania is dread of that chimera, the "Colossus of the North," of the pastime of nestling up to Europe in the hope of annoying us. It postpones, too, the hope of the morbid ones that we shall come to war with a powerful enemy. Now, perhaps, even these will appreciate the remark of a diplomatist of a certain weak country in contact with European powers, who once said: "If we only had the United States for a neighbor! What I can't understand is that your neighbors do not realize their good luck." Turning from these exceptional phenomena, the very fact of the war leaves the United States in a general position of greater political prestige.

Whatever the upshot of the European tragedy, its political and psychological consequences are likely to be great. If it result in new national divisions upon racial lines of more reality, who knows but that the awakened spirits of nationality will germinate fresh military ambitions? Or will the horrors of the war force political reforms and the search for assurance in more democratic institutions against any repetition of those horrors? And is popular government an assurance against useless war while men remain warlike even when not military?

Except from the successful countries or from those where disaster has brought such sobering change that men can return to work heartened with new hope, when the war is over there is likely to be a heavy emigration of disgusted people. Possibly even victory will be so dear that men will emigrate from a country half prostrate in its triumph. Many will come as the Puritans came, and as the bulk of our own excellent Germanic element came, and will cast in their lot with a new nation. We shall get a good share, but doubtless some will go to the republics of the far South, and some to the highlands of the tropics and through the canal to the West Coast. If so, this will tend gradually toward increased production and purchasing power, as well as toward a leavening of social, political, and economic conditions of life.

If the war were indecisive or left all the combatants more or less prostrated, peaceful immigration might give a big impulse to the gradual growing up of powerful States in the temperate zone of the extreme South. The situation there, and the evolution of our own power, make it perhaps even now fair to consider the question of regarding as optional in any given case the assertion by us of the Monroe Doctrine much below the equator, let us say, beyond which it may possibly be doubtful whether we have nowadays much reason for special interest.

But, even so, our relations to South America and our obligations under the Monroe Doctrine, in spite of the blessed fortifications of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, leave us where it is tempting fate to be without a navy of the first magnitude, and a big merchant marine. We have seen what happened to Belgium and Luxemburg. We have seen how even some of the most enlightened nations can still make force their god. Nations learn slowly, and there are perhaps some new big ones coming on, like China.

If the war is a fight to a finish, and the Allies triumph, we can imagine Russia, with its teeming millions of people, occupied for a while in the Near East; Japan consolidating her position in the Far East, an increasingly powerful neighbor to us in the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Pacific Ocean; France still a great power; and England as a world power of uncomfortably ubiquitous strength, able to challenge the Monroe Doctrine at will.

Or, let us suppose that Germany should triumph and that German emigration should swarm into the Caribbean countries, or into Brazil or some other country where there is already a large German colony—elated, triumphant Germans, not Germans disgusted by a disastrous war. Would Germany be likely to heed the Monroe Doctrine, or would it be only another "scrap of paper"?

In the present stage of civilization the safety of America should not be left dependent upon the forbearance of any power that may emerge dangerously strong from the war or that may otherwise arise. The obligations and rights of our Latin-American relations, under the Monroe Doctrine and otherwise, like our security and our efficiency as a force for peace and good in the world, demand a big navy, a merchant marine, and the self-discipline and safeguard of adequate military preparedness. The need of these and of a diplomacy of intelligent self-interest, continuity, and intense nationalism is the lesson brought home to us by the European war in its effects upon our Latin-American relations as well as upon our general position as a great power.



AN EASTER MESSAGE

By BEATRICE BARRY.

Into what depths of misery thou art hurled, Belgium, thou second Saviour of the World! Thou who hast died For all of Europe, lo, we bathe thy feet So cruelly pierced, and find the service sweet, Thou crucified.

But though we mourn thy agony and loss, And weep beneath the shadow of thy cross— We know the day That brings the resurrection and the life Shall dawn for thee when war and all its strife Hath passed away.

Then, out of all her travail and her pain, Belgium, though crushed to earth, shall rise again; And on the sod Whence sprang a race so strong, so free from guile, Men shall behold, in just a little while, The smile of God.

Land of the brave—soon, by God's grace, the free— Thy woe is transient; joy shall come to thee; It cannot fail. The darkest night gives way to rosy dawn, And thou, perchance, shalt see on Easter morn, The Holy Grail.



An Interview on the War With Henry James

By Preston Lockwood

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 21, 1915.]

One of the compensations of the war, which we ought to take advantage of, is the chance given the general public to approach on the personal side some of the distinguished men who have not hitherto lived much in the glare of the footlights. Henry James has probably done this as little as any one; he has enjoyed for upward of forty years a reputation not confined to his own country, has published a long succession of novels, tales, and critical papers, and yet has apparently so delighted in reticence as well as in expression that he has passed his seventieth year without having responsibly "talked" for publication or figured for it otherwise than pen in hand.

Shortly after the outbreak of the war Mr. James found himself, to his professed great surprise, Chairman of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, now at work in France, and today, at the end of three months of bringing himself to the point, has granted me, as a representative of THE NEW YORK TIMES, an interview. What this departure from the habit of a lifetime means to him he expressed at the outset:

"I can't put," Mr. James said, speaking with much consideration and asking that his punctuation as well as his words should be noted, "my devotion and sympathy for the cause of our corps more strongly than in permitting it thus to overcome my dread of the assault of the interviewer, whom I have deprecated, all these years, with all the force of my preference for saying myself and without superfluous aid, without interference in the guise of encouragement and cheer, anything I may think worth my saying. Nothing is worth my saying that I cannot help myself out with better, I hold, than even the most suggestive young gentleman with a notebook can help me. It may be fatuous of me, but, believing myself possessed of some means of expression, I feel as if I were sadly giving it away when, with the use of it urgent, I don't gratefully employ it, but appeal instead to the art of somebody else."

It was impossible to be that "somebody else," or, in other words, the person privileged to talk with Mr. James, to sit in presence of his fine courtesy and earnestness, without understanding the sacrifice he was making, and making only because he had finally consented to believe that it would help the noble work of relief which a group of young Americans, mostly graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, are carrying on along their stretch of the fighting line in Northern France.

Mr. James frankly desired his remarks to bear only on the merits of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. It enjoys today the fullest measure of his appreciation and attention; it appeals deeply to his benevolent instincts, and he gives it sympathy and support as one who has long believed, and believes more than ever, in spite of everything, at this international crisis, in the possible development of "closer communities and finer intimacies" between America and Great Britain, between the country of his birth and the country, as he puts it, of his "shameless frequentation."

There are many people who are eloquent about the war, who are authorities on the part played in it by the motor ambulance and who take an interest in the good relations of Great Britain and the United States; but there is nobody who can tell us, as Mr. James can, about style and the structure of sentences, and all that appertains to the aspect and value of words. Now and then in what here follows he speaks familiarly of these things for the first time in his life, not by any means because he jumped at the chance, but because his native kindness, whether consciously or unconsciously, seemed so ready to humor the insisting inquirer.

"It is very difficult," he said, seeking to diminish the tension so often felt by a journalist, even at the moment of a highly appreciated occasion, "to break into graceful license after so long a life of decorum; therefore you must excuse me if my egotism doesn't run very free or my complacency find quite the right turns."

He had received me in the offices of the corps, businesslike rooms, modern for London, low-ceiled and sparely furnished. It was not by any means the sort of setting in which as a reader of Henry James I had expected to run to earth the author of "The Golden Bowl," but the place is, nevertheless, today, in the tension of war time, one of the few approaches to a social resort outside his Chelsea home where he can be counted on. Even that delightful Old World retreat, Lamb House, Rye, now claims little of his time.

The interviewer spoke of the waterside Chelsea and Mr. James's long knowledge of it, but, sitting not overmuch at his ease and laying a friendly hand on the shoulder of his tormentor, he spoke, instead, of motor ambulances, making the point, in the interest of clearness, that the American Ambulance Corps of Neuilly, though an organization with which Richard Norton's corps is in the fullest sympathy, does not come within the scope of his remarks.

"I find myself Chairman of our Corps Committee for no great reason that I can discover save my being the oldest American resident here interested in its work; at the same time that if I render a scrap of help by putting on record my joy even in the rather ineffectual connection so far as 'doing' anything is concerned, I needn't say how welcome you are to my testimony. What I mainly seem to grasp, I should say, is that in regard to testifying at all unlimitedly by the aid of the newspapers, I have to reckon with a certain awkwardness in our position. Here comes up, you see, the question of our reconciling a rather indispensable degree of reserve as to the detail of our activity with the general American demand for publicity at any price. There are ways in which the close presence of war challenges the whole claim for publicity; and I need hardly say that this general claim has been challenged, practically, by the present horrific complexity of things at the front, as neither the Allies themselves nor watching neutrals have ever seen it challenged before. The American public is, of course, little used to not being able to hear, and hear as an absolute right, about anything that the press may suggest that it ought to hear about; so that nothing may be said ever to happen anywhere that it doesn't count on having reported to it, hot and hot, as the phrase is, several times a day. We were the first American ambulance corps in the field, and we have a record of more than four months' continuous service with one of the French armies, but the rigor of the objection to our taking the world into our intimate confidence is not only shown by our still unbroken inability to report in lively installments, but receives also a sidelight from the fact that numerous like private corps maintained by donations on this side of the sea are working at the front without the least commemoration of their deeds—that is, without a word of journalistic notice.

"I hope that by the time these possibly too futile remarks of mine come to such light as may await them Mr. Norton's report of our general case may have been published, and nothing would give the committee greater pleasure than that some such controlled statement on our behalf, best proceeding from the scene of action itself, should occasionally appear. The ideal would, of course, be that exactly the right man, at exactly the right moment, should report exactly the right facts, in exactly the right manner, and when that happy consummation becomes possible we shall doubtless revel in funds."

Mr. James had expressed himself with such deliberation and hesitation that I was reminded of what I had heard of all the verbal alterations made by him in novels and tales long since published; to the point, we are perhaps incorrectly told of replacing a "she answered" by a "she indefinitely responded."

I should, indeed, mention that on my venturing to put to Mr. James a question or two about his theory of such changes he replied that no theory could be stated, at any rate in the off-hand manner that I seemed to invite, without childish injustice to the various considerations by which a writer is moved. These determinant reasons differ with the context and the relations of parts to parts and to the total sense in a way of which no a priori account can be given.

"I dare say I strike you," he went on, "as rather bewilderedly weighing my words; but I may perhaps explain my so doing very much as I the other day heard a more interesting fact explained. A distinguished English naval expert happened to say to me that the comparative non-production of airships in this country indicated, in addition to other causes, a possible limitation of the British genius in that direction, and then on my asking him why that class of craft shouldn't be within the compass of the greatest makers of sea-ships, replied, after brief reflection: 'Because the airship is essentially a bad ship, and we English can't make a bad ship well enough.' Can you pardon," Mr. James asked, "my making an application of this to the question of one's amenability or plasticity to the interview? The airship of the interview is for me a bad ship, and I can't make a bad ship well enough."

Catching Mr. James's words as they came was not very difficult; but there was that in the manner of his speech that cannot be put on paper, the delicate difference between the word recalled and the word allowed to stand, the earnestness of the massive face and alert eye, tempered by the genial "comment of the body," as R.L. Stevenson has it.

Henry James does not look his seventy years. He has a finely shaped head, and a face, at once strong and serene, which the painter and the sculptor may well have liked to interpret. Indeed, in fine appreciation they have so wrought. Derwent Wood's admirable bust, purchased from last year's Royal Academy, shown by the Chantrey Fund, will be permanently placed in the Tate Gallery, and those who fortunately know Sargent's fine portrait, to be exhibited in the Sargent Room at the San Francisco Exhibition, will recall its having been slashed into last year by the militant suffragettes, though now happily restored to such effect that no trace of the outrage remains.

Mr. James has a mobile mouth, a straight nose, a forehead which has thrust back the hair from the top of his commanding head, although it is thick at the sides over the ears, and repeats in its soft gray the color of his kindly eyes. Before taking in these physical facts one receives an impression of benignity and amenity not often conveyed, even by the most distinguished. And, taking advantage of this amiability, I asked if certain words just used should be followed by a dash, and even boldly added: "Are you not famous, Mr. James, for the use of dashes?"

"Dash my fame!" he impatiently replied. "And remember, please, that dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce. Dashes, it seems almost platitudinous to say, have their particular representative virtue, their quickening force, and, to put it roughly, strike both the familiar and the emphatic note, when those are the notes required, with a felicity beyond either the comma or the semicolon; though indeed a fine sense for the semicolon, like any sort of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood, on which the whole perspective in a sentence may depend, seems anything but common. Does nobody ever notice the calculated use by French writers of a short series of suggestive points in the current of their prose? I confess to a certain shame for my not employing frankly that shade of indication, a finer shade still than the dash.... But what on earth are we talking about?" And the Chairman of the Corps Committee pulled himself up in deprecation of our frivolity, which I recognized by acknowledging that we might indeed hear more about the work done and doing at the front by Richard Norton and his energetic and devoted co-workers. Then I plunged recklessly to draw my victim.

"May not a large part of the spirit which animates these young men be a healthy love of adventure?" I asked.

The question seemed to open up such depths that Mr. James considered a moment and began:

"I, of course, don't personally know many of our active associates, who naturally waste very little time in London. But, since you ask me, I prefer to think of them as moved, first and foremost, not by the idea of the fun or the sport they may have, or of the good thing they may make of the job for themselves, but by that of the altogether exceptional chance opened to them of acting blessedly and savingly for others, though indeed if we come to that there is no such sport in the world as so acting when anything in the nature of risk or exposure is attached. The horrors, the miseries, the monstrosities they are in presence of are so great surely as not to leave much of any other attitude over when intelligent sympathy has done its best.

"Personally I feel so strongly on everything that the war has brought into question for the Anglo-Saxon peoples that humorous detachment or any other thinness or tepidity of mind on the subject affects me as vulgar impiety, not to say as rank blasphemy; our whole race tension became for me a sublimely conscious thing from the moment Germany flung at us all her explanation of her pounce upon Belgium for massacre and ravage in the form of the most insolent, 'Because I choose to, damn you all!' recorded in history.

"The pretension to smashing world rule by a single people, in virtue of a monopoly of every title, every gift and every right, ought perhaps to confound us more by its grotesqueness than to alarm us by its energy; but never do cherished possessions, whether of the hand or of the spirit, become so dear to us as when overshadowed by vociferous aggression. How can one help seeing that such aggression, if hideously successful in Europe, would, with as little loss of time as possible, proceed to apply itself to the American side of the world, and how can one, therefore, not feel that the Allies are fighting to the death for the soul and the purpose and the future that are in us, for the defense of every ideal that has most guided our growth and that most assures our unity?

"Of course, since you ask me, my many years of exhibited attachment to the conditions of French and of English life, with whatever fond play of reflection and reaction may have been involved in it, make it inevitable that these countries should peculiarly appeal to me at the hour of their peril, their need and their heroism, and I am glad to declare that, though I had supposed I knew what that attachment was, I find I have any number of things more to learn about it. English life, wound up to the heroic pitch, is at present most immediately before me, and I can scarcely tell you what a privilege I feel it to share the inspiration and see further revealed the character of this decent and dauntless people.

"However, I am indeed as far as you may suppose from assuming that what you speak to me of as the 'political' bias is the only ground on which the work of our corps for the Allies should appeal to the American public. Political, I confess, has become for me in all this a loose and question-begging term, but if we must resign ourselves to it as explaining some people's indifference, let us use a much better one for inviting their confidence. It will do beautifully well if givers and workers and helpers are moved by intelligent human pity, and they are with us abundantly enough if they feel themselves simply roused by, and respond to, the most awful exhibition of physical and moral anguish the world has ever faced, and which it is the strange fate of our actual generations to see unrolled before them. We welcome any lapse of logic that may connect inward vagueness with outward zeal, if it be the zeal of subscribers, presenters or drivers of cars, or both at once, stretcher-bearers, lifters, healers, consolers, handy Anglo-French interpreters, (these extremely precious,) smoothers of the way; in short, after whatever fashion. We ask of nobody any waste of moral or of theoretic energy, nor any conviction of any sort, but that the job is inspiring and the honest, educated man a match for it.

"If I seem to cast doubt on any very driving intelligence of the great issue as a source of sympathy with us, I think this is because I have been struck, whenever I have returned to my native land, by the indifference of Americans at large to the concerns and preoccupations of Europe. This indifference has again and again seemed to me quite beyond measure or description, though it may be in a degree suggested by the absence throughout the many-paged American newspaper of the least mention of a European circumstance unless some not-to-be-blinked war or revolution, or earthquake or other cataclysm has happened to apply the lash to curiosity. The most comprehensive journalistic formula that I have found myself, under that observation, reading into the general case is the principle that the first duty of the truly appealing sheet in a given community is to teach every individual reached by it—every man, woman and child—to count on appearing there, in their habit as they live, if they will only wait for their turn.

"However," he continued, "my point is simply my plea for patience with our enterprise even at the times when we can't send home sensational figures. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' and the essence of our utility, as of that of any ambulance corps, is just to be there, on any and every contingency, including the blessed contingency of a temporary drop in the supply of the wounded turned out and taken on—since such comparative intermissions occur. Ask our friends, I beg you, to rid themselves of the image of our working on schedule time or on guarantee of a maximum delivery; we are dependent on the humors of battle, on incalculable rushes and lapses, on violent outbreaks of energy which rage and pass and are expressly designed to bewilder. It is not for the poor wounded to oblige us by making us showy, but for us to let them count on our open arms and open lap as troubled children count on those of their mother. It is now to be said, moreover, that our opportunity of service threatens inordinately to grow; such things may any day begin to occur at the front as will make what we have up to now been able to do mere child's play, though some of our help has been rendered when casualties were occurring at the rate, say, of 5,000 in twenty minutes, which ought, on the whole, to satisfy us. In face of such enormous facts of destruction—"

Here Mr. James broke off as if these facts were, in their horror, too many and too much for him. But after another moment he explained his pause.

"One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one's words as to endure one's thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk."

This sounded rather desperate, yet the incorrigible interviewer, conscious of the wane of his only chance, ventured to glance at the possibility of a word or two on the subject of Mr. James's present literary intentions. But the kindly hand here again was raised, and the mild voice became impatient.

"Pardon my not touching on any such irrelevance. All I want is to invite the public, as unblushingly as possible, to take all the interest in us it can; which may be helped by knowing that our bankers are Messrs. Brown Brothers & Co., 59 Wall Street, New York City, and that checks should be made payable to the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps."



A Talk With Belgium's Governor

By Edward Lyall Fox

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April 11, 1915.]

Copyright, 1915, by the Wildman News Service.

"It would have been a very grave mistake not to have invaded Belgium. It would have been an unforgivable military blunder. I justify the invading of Belgium on absolute military grounds. What other grounds are there worth while talking about when a nation is in a war for its existence?"

It is the ruler of German Belgium speaking. The stern, serious-faced Governor General von Bissing, whom they call "Iron Fist," the man who crushes out sedition. Returning, I had just come up from the front around Lille, and almost the only clothes I had were those on my back; and the mud of the trenches still clung to my boots and puttees in yellow cakes. They were not the most proper clothes in which to meet King Albert's successor, but in field gray I had to go.

The Governor General received me in a dainty Louis Quinze room done in rose and French gray, and filled incongruously with delicate chairs and heavy brocaded curtains, a background which instantly you felt precisely suited his Excellency. In the English newspapers, which, by the way, are not barred from Berlin cafes, I had read of his Excellency as the "Iron Fist," or the "Heavy Heel," and I rather expected to see a heavy, domineering man. Instead, a slender, stealthy man in the uniform of a General rose from behind a tapestry topped table, revealing, as he did, a slight stoop in his back, perhaps a trifle foppish. He held out a long-fingered hand.

General von Bissing spoke no English. Somehow I imagined him to be one of those old German patriots who did not learn the language simply because it was English. Through Lieut. Herrmann I asked the Governor General what Germany was doing toward the reconstruction of Belgium. I told him America, when I had left, was under the impression that Belgium was a land utterly laid waste by the German armies. I frankly told him that in America the common belief was that the German military Government meant tyranny; what was Germany doing for Belgium?