fraudulent about the venerable institution of Private Property. It is endorsed by society, defended by the Church, maintained by the Law, and the slightest tampering with it is severely punished by bewigged Judges. Oh, certainly it must be all right; and one of these days I will get some one to explain to me quite clearly whyin return for what unguessed servicethe world keeps on putting adequate sums of its currency into my pocket. As I say, it must be all right; I have a feeling that it is all right. anyhow, if those middle-aged and elderly men-ratepayers I suppose they are, and fathers of families-who sit all day behind bank-counters, choose to hand me out sovereigns in little shovels, is it for me, I ask you, to question or make a fuss about the proceedings of these highly respectable persons?

THE SPRINGS OF ACTION. "What am I? What is Man?"

And,

I had looked into a number of books for an answer to this not uninteresting question, before I came on Jeremy Bentham's simple and satisfactory explanation: Man is a mechanism moved by just so many Springs of Action. These Springs or Motives he enumerates in an elaborate table, and glancing over them this morning before getting up, I began with Charity, AllEmbracing Benevolence, Love of Knowledge, Laudable Ambition, Godly Zeal. Then I waited, but there was no sound nor buzz of any wheel beginning to move in my inner mechanism. But, looking again at the table, I saw Arrogance, Ostentation, Vainglory, Abomination, Rage, Fury, Revenge, and I was about to leap automatically from my bed in a paroxysm of passion, when fortunately my eye fell on another set of Motives: Love of Ease, Aversion to Labor, Indolence, Procrastination, Sloth.

THE GOAT.

In the midst of my anecdote a sudden misgiving chilled me had I told them about this Goat before? And then as I talked-abyss opening beneath abyss-there gaped on me a darker speculation: when goats are mentioned, do I automatically and always tell this story about the Goat at Portsmouth?

LONGEVITY.

"But when you are as old as I am!" I said to the lady in pink satin.

"But I don't know how old you are," the lady in pink satin answered almost archly. We were getting on quite nicely.

"Oh, I'm endlessly old; my memory goes back almost forever. I come out of the Middle Ages. I am the primitive savage we all descend from; I believe in Devil-worship, the power of the Stars; I dance under the new Moon, naked and tattooed and holy. I am a Cave-dweller, a contemporary of Mastodons and Mammoths; I am pleistocene and neolithic, and full of the lusts and terrors, of the great pre-glacial forests. But that's nothing; I am millions of years older; I am an arboreal Ape, an aged Baboon, with all its instincts; I am a presimian quadruped, I have great claws, eyes that see in the dark, and a long prehensile tail."

"Good gracious!" said the terrified young lady in pink, pretending to laugh, however, as if she thought I was trying to be funny. Then she turned and for the rest of the dinner talked to her other neighbor.

DISSATISFACTION.

For one thing I hate spiders: I hate all kinds of insects. Their cold intelligence, their empty, stereotyped, unremitting industry repels me. And I am not altogether happy about the

But I am not a pessimist, or misanthrope, or grumbler; I bear it all, the burden of Public Affairs, the immensity of Space, the brevity of Life, and the thought of the all-swallowing Grave-all this I put up with without impatience: I accept the common lot. And if now and then for a moment it seems too much; if I get my feet wet, or have to wait too long for tea, and my soul in these wanes of the moon and sad occultations cries out in French C'est fini! I always answer Patienza! in Italian.

The New Statesman.

THE EVIL EYE.

Drawn by the unfelt wind in my little sail over the shallow estuary, I lay in my boat, lost in a dream of mere existence. The cool water glided through my trailing fingers; and leaning over I watched the sands that slid beneath me, the weeds that languidly swayed with the boat's motion. I was the cool water, I was the gliding sand and the swaying weed, I was the sea and mirrored sky and sun, I was the whole vast Universe.

Suddenly between my eyes and the sandy bottom a face looked up at me, glassed on the smooth film of water over which I glided. At one look from that too familiar and yet how sinister and goblin a face my soaring and immeasurable soul collapsed like a wrecked balloon; I shrank sadly back into my named personality, and sat there, hot and bored and insignificant in my shabby little boat.

L. Pearsall Smith.

Mr. Wilson's speech at Washington dots the i's and crosses the t's of his recent Note to Russia. He dealt very faithfully and trenchantly with the motives and manoeuvres of Germany for bringing about a premature peace at the present stage in the war. After describing the "Central Europe" program of militarist Berlin, he pointed oùt that at the moment it has actually been realized, and the Prussian machine holds practically the whole of the enormous territories comprised in it, with some others, in an iron grip. Unless that grip is forcibly relaxed and the militarist autocracy itself brought to the ground, there can be no permanent peace for the world. If it ended the war unbeaten, even though it voluntarily withdrew from some of its conquests, even indeed though it withdrew from all those which it has made in this war from its enemies and not from its Allies, the substantial success of its policy would remain the outstanding result, and would ensure the continuance both of its rule over Germany and of its plot against the world. As Mr. Wilson said, speaking of the Prussian war-makers:

If they succeed, America will fall within the menace; and we and all the rest of the world must remain armed, as they will remain; and must make ready for the next step in their aggression. If they fail, the world may unite for peace, and Germany may be of the union.

Of the German peace-talk designed to secure this victory, the President, spoke at some length. As he was himself a principal target of it, before he came into the war, it is interesting to have his statement that

it has come to me in all sorts of guises, but never with the terms disclosed

which the German Government would be willing to accept.

This seems to conflict directly with a statement spread widely in this country by Mr. Noel Buxton, M.P., following his visit to Washington towards the end of last year. Mr. Buxton declared publicly-and made much capital of the statement for propaganda purposes that he had seen Mr. Wilson and other leading American statesmen, and that they had told him Germany's peace-terms, which were of a very moderate character. How this could be, if the peace-terms were never disclosed to the President, it would seem to be for Mr. Buxton to explain. Meanwhile it is useful to see how clearly Mr. Wilson apprehends the characteristic design of the Prussian leaders-the arch anti-Liberals of Europe-to trap Liberalism into becoming the instrument of its own destruction. "Their present aim," he says,

is to deceive all those who throughout the world stand for the rights of peoples and the self-government of nations; for they see what immense strength the forces of justice and liberalism are getting out of this war. They are employing Liberals in their enterprises. Let them once succeed, and these men, now their tools, will be ground to powder beneath the weight of the great military Empire; the Revolutionists of Russia will be cut off from all succor and the co-operation of Western Europe, and a counter-revolution will be fostered and supported; Germany herself will lose her chance of freedom, and all Europe will arm for the next final struggle.

The effectiveness of this passage resides in the fact that it is a plain statement of unescapable truths. Among liberal-minded and forwardlooking men in Great Britain, France and Italy, as well as in the United

States, these truths are generally recognized. The only Allied country where they are very widely questioned is Russia; and the lurking tragedy of it is that while the questioning and the hesitation are natural, in view of the profound inexperience (daily more

The London Chronicle.

evident just now) of those who have the ear of the Council of Soldiers' and Workmen's Deputies at Petrograd, it is precisely Russia herself who is bound to pay the heaviest price in subsequent history for any weakening now of the Allied purpose.

In a series of semi-detached sketches named for their central figure, "Bindle," Herbert Jenkins describes a series of practical jokes perpetrated by a journeyman furniture-mover. He deposits the entire movable property of one household in the flat of another; throws a hotel into confusion, when on a night job, by exchanging the numbers of the guests' rooms; turns a Temperance fête into an orgy by introducing a mixture of alcohol and distilled mead into the lemonade; and impersonates an Australian millionaire at Oxford to the chagrin of his supposed nephew. Bindle must be credited with a certain shrewd philosophy of human nature, and unquestionably he deserves the tribute paid him by his author in the sub-title, "The Story of a Cheerful Soul," but whether the reader will think with the medical students whose rollicking fun he shares that he is "the rival of Aristophanes as maker of mirth," or with the somewhat acid Mrs. Bindle that "his talk isn't fit for decent ears," will depend on the reader's taste. Frederick A. Stokes Co.

"Petunia," the heroine of Mrs. George Wemyss's charming story, is the plain, sensible, and kindly daughter of a testy squire, whose will-drawn in a fit of irritation against the wife of his oldest son-leaves his fine Elizabethan house, with a handsome income, to her as long as she remains

unmarried. How four sisters-in-law conspire in the interest of the fifth to find Petunia a husband, how her Aunt Jane, estranged from the squire during a long life, comes to collect arrears of hospitality from her, how she goes to London with Aunt Jane and walks in the Park at the wrong hour, in the wrong place, with the wrong people, and how she gains a right of way down a garden path that leads to unforeseen happiness-all are told in Mrs. Wemyss's most delightful manner by an onlooker, whose husband, "Simple Simon," contributes a whimsical philosophy to the tale, and whose son, the Shrimp-"that most delectable of things to a landmother's heart, a middy"-brings it into close touch with the war. The author of "The Professional Aunt" and "People of Popham" has really surpassed herself. It would be hard to find a story more readable, quotable and lovable. E. P. Dutton & Co.

The present phases of the great war are so engrossing, and speculations as to its duration seem so profitless, that comparatively little attention is paid to the problems of social and industrial reconstruction which must come after it. Arthur Gleason's "Inside the British Isles-1917" (The Century Co.) is the first serious contribution to the discussion of this question, and it is suggestive and thought-compelling to a high degree. What Mr. Gleason sees

and depicts with eager enthusiasm in the British Isles today is aptly summarized in the title of his first chapter, "Democracy on the March"-the greatest "extension of democratic control ever applied to the map of the world." The relations and the future of labor, the changes in the sphere and the aspirations of women, the position of Ireland, and the social revolutions which seem imminent in the near future, are the subjects of the later chapters. Mr. Gleason is the prophet of the passing of old England, the crumbling of its caste system, and the dawn of a day when democratic control shall be established and labor shall take over the management of society. That is a vision of the future which to some will seem a dream and to others a nightmare, but, whatever may be the reader's point of view, he can scarcely fail to find Mr. Gleason's description of existing conditions absorbingly interesting.

It is clear that Claude M. Fuess, whose history of Phillips Academy, Andover, is published by Houghton Mifflin Co. in an attractive and substantial volume under the title "An Old New England School" found the necessary research and the writing of the history an agreeable task; for there is no trace of haste anywhere. He enters into the fullest details of the lives of the founders and the motives which impelled them to establish and maintain the school; he describes the peculiarities and methods of each of the principals and the incidents of their administrations in much the same way that one might outline the successive reigns of a line of monarchs; and with it all, he succeeds in imparting to his narrative a flavor which gives it a lively interest even to readers who have no special concern with the Academy itself, but to whom it stands as a typical New

England institution, reflecting, at all stages of its history, New England ideals and habits of thought. Founded in the eighteenth century, and continuing, through all changes and vicissitudes, to the twentieth, with widening influence and prosperity, it has been an educational and religious force of unique significance. The original schedule included only Latin and Greek, a very little mathematics, and some reading in religious treatises. Every morning, the school opened with the reading and singing of a psalm; then one class repeated from memory two pages of Greek grammar; another class repeated a page and a half of Latin grammar; then passages from Cheever's "Accidence" of "Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue," a standard textbook of the time, were repeated; then there were classes in arithmetic-the Rule of Three, Fellowship and Practice; and the school closed at night with the reading of Dr. Doddridge's "Family Expositor," questions, reflections, the singing of a hymn and prayer. Present-day students at Phillips would find that a meagre and solemn program, but it was from such beginnings that the Academy of today took its origin and inspiration. Every stage in the history is interesting-not the least so the chapters describing "The Reign of 'Uncle Sam' Taylor" in the middle of the last century. Fifty or more portraits, and pictures of buildings and grounds illustrate the book.

"The Life of Robert Hare" by Edgar Fahs Smith (J. B. Lippincott Co.) is an elaborate and enthusiastic study of the career of one of the earliest and most distinguished of American chemists. The author's purpose, as he defines it in his Preface, is to assemble the labors of Robert Hare in such a form that students of chemistry may learn to know him better and realize the