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distasteful to her, and they both seek to bully Denmark into becoming their serf by threatening that in any event they will whenever convenient invade her and occupy her territory. Again we ask, is this "the ordinary work of ordinary human beings"?

Then there are the Argentine revelations. Here we have secret diplomacy organizing murder to conceal outrage, and proposing a "settlement" which is to deceive not only the nations immediately concerned but the whole world; and such is the corruption of secret diplomacy that the Diplomatic Service of a neutral Power lends its assistance to this foul conspiracy. Is there any hint here of energy "directed not to making quarrels but to healing them," or of such manners and morals as govern the conduct of their business affairs by decent men? Finally, we may refer to the secret treaties concluded with the ex-Tsar by the Briand Government for the tearing away from Germany not only of Alsace-Lorraine but of unquestionably German territory, at a time when the two Governments were publicly protesting their zeal for a settlement based upon nationality. Is not the conclusion inevitable that in all these four instances, at least secret diplomacy was indeed precisely what Mr. Balfour denied it to be-"a criminal operation intended to cover up transactions which lead to divisions among mankind?" It will be said that nothing of the kind has been proved against The Manchester Guardian.

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British secret diplomacy. Happily that is true. But are we to suppose that when Russian, German, and French diplomatists do these things English diplomatists have some special virtue or some mysterious charm which protects them against the like offense? The truth is far more likely that such a system as secret diplomacy is far more powerful than the individuals involved in it. What is the system in its essence? It is absolutism, it is power to shape, without being subject to control, the relations bebetween nation and nation. That is the character of secret diplomacy anywhere and everywhere, whether the Government it be practised by be nominally an autocracy, a bureaucracy, a republic, or a constitutional monarchy. Now absolutism, freedom from control, is a corrupting force which few, very few human beings have the moral strength to resist. In theory one can imagine it the happy instrument of a benevolently tyrannical genius. In practice it is what we see in the Sukhomlinoff trial, in the Willy-Nicky correspondence, in Count Luxburg's dispatches, in the TsarDoumergue treaties "a criminal operation intended to cover up transactions which lead to divisions among mankind." If this war ends, as Mr. Balfour desires, with secret diplomacy entrenched and perpetuated, no matter which group of Powers will have won, democracy will surely have been defeated.

A PLEA FOR MORE WAR HUMOR.

Nobody can deny that Mr. Begbie makes out a strong case against war humor,* if you look at the subject from his standpoint. But there are other angles from which it ought to be *THE LIVING AGE, Nov. 17, 1917.

viewed, for if his plea were granted and carried to its logical conclusion there would be an end of all humor-in peace as well as in war.

It wasn't war that first brought death into the world and all our woe.

Mr. Begbie asks us to think of the conjunction, "War -Humor," as if they were irreconcilably opposed. I would like you to think also of the conjunction, Life-Humor, seeing that, in the long run, life kills more than war, for it ends by killing us all. Incidentally, it kills some of us more mercilessly than war does, with slower, longer torments to body and soul than war can inflict, yet we see nothing incongruous in jesting about life. No death is more terrible, more really agonizing, than are many of the deaths that happen in the years when, without noise of guns or sight of visible wounds, we are fighting each other in business, ruining each other in fierce competition, sweating and slaughtering thousands under the noiseless but effective drum fire of poverty in those slums and mean streets that Mr. Begbie has himself denounced. Except superficially, death in war is not more horrible than death in peace, it is only more obviously horrible.

Most of us would sooner be blown instantly to nothing by a shell, or sit out a week's harrowing bombardment, than die gradually through the years of a wasting consumption. Yet Hood made a jest even of consumption; laughed at the lank visage, punned about the spare ribs, found humor in the shortness of breath; and one loves and honors him the more for it, since he was dying of consumption himself. If he had taken it quite seriously, and made everyone around him miserable by insisting on their also taking it so, he would not have won our admiration and stood, as he stands, one of the dearest and most heroic figures in our literature.

Certainly, no man sitting in safety at home can with decency make jokes about the trenches, but the more the men who are there, or have been there, can do so, the better for themselves and for the rest of us. It is still as true as

it was when Shakespeare said it that the merry heart goes all the day but the sad soon tires. No man ever died of laughter, as a matter of fact, but plenty have died for the lack of it. If the Germans had some humor they would be less brutal, and they would not have written that Hymn of Hate which has been a source of such joy to our own fighting men.

To illustrate my contention that, nowadays, particularly, it is our duty not to wear our hearts upon our sleeves, I would like to repeat two little stories that were told to me when I was out at the front rather less than a year ago.

At the end of 1915, a kindly, wellintentioned young parson, who took the sad business of war very seriously indeed, was out there on a religious mission, and decided to hold a watch night service. His hut was filled to overcrowding. Something went wrong with the lighting arrangements, and he was reduced to a solitary candle by way of illumination. Standing on the platform (I am summarizing his own account) with that glimmer, on the table beside him, he could only see the first few rows of faces, but knew there was row behind row of them, unseen, watching him from the darkness beyond. All this gave an added touch of solemnity to the gathering; he was deeply impressed, and spoke of serious things more seriously perhaps than he had ever spoken before. After one or two fitting hymns had been sung, at midnight he was moved to lay his watch on the table and say earnestly, "Let us now have five minutes of silent prayer together."

The silence that fell upon that hut touched him almost instantly with a sort of fear. Then, of a sudden, he was shaken by soft, broken sounds from somewhere in the darkness-a strangled sob, little smothered cries. "It sent a chill through me," he said, "and I realized in a flash that I had done a

cruel thing. I thanked God fervently when the five minutes were gone and I could ask the soldier at the piano to play something and break the tension which was too much for us all."

My other story is of an incident that happened only a few days before that at a place a little farther behind the line. An Irish soldier was there recovering in a convalescent camp. He had been slightly wounded, and was suffering badly from shell-shock, which, for a time, made a nervous wreck of him. Late in the autumn there was talk of arranging entertainments for Christmas, and this man, who, before the war, was a popular Dublin comedian, volunteered to get up a proper Christmas pantomime. He extemporized a stage in a Y. M. C. A. hut, painted the scenery, wrote the pantomime, which was full of frivolous war allusions, and was not only his own stage manager, but himself acted a leading part in the extravaganza.

On the first night of the show, when the seats were crammed with wounded soldiers and soldiers from other parts of the vast camp, either newly returned from the trenches or shortly going up The London Chronicle.

into them, and while the hut was echoing with continuous roars of laughter-twice that Irishman was missed by those who were helping him in the management, and each time he was found sitting alone in the dark outside shaking as if in an ague. On the second occasion he was crying like a child -crying wretchedly that his nervous weakness could so master him. But he wouldn't hear of being excused and letting a substitute finish his part for him. He resolutely pulled himself together, and when his cue came he was ready in the wings to go on again and do his share of the fun-making with the jolliest irresponsible gusto, and not a man among the happy, laughing audience had his pleasure marred by so much as a suspicion of what had been happening behind the scenes.

Whenever I think of him, the thought of that Irishman warms the heart of me. Wasn't there more of kindness, of unselfishness, of heroism, even of seriousness, in his way of taking the war than if he had treated it as a subject for undiluted gravity? But I won't point the moral of these two stories; everybody can point it for himself.

A. St. John Adcock.

THE UNCLE ON LEAVE.

I felt that one day out of my priceless ten must be dedicated to my niece and godchild Phyllis. A goddaughter expects more even than a silver mug, and I suggested the Zoo to her mother as I faced her in the drawing-room.

"Yes," she said, "Phyllis was sure you'd take her to the Zoo. But, John, she'd like of all things if you'd call for her at the Kindergarten. Would you mind. You're such a kind godfather."

There is a wistful humility coupled with adamantine determination about most mothers.

LIVING AGE, VOL. VIII, No. 400.

I met Phyllis at her school door, was stared at open-mouthed by twenty little boys and girls. At this I did not flinch.

If I had not earned my Military Cross, I deserved it that day. Unheeding of my nose, I visited every cage and fed or stroked every animal except where such feeding is banned by authority. I refused to offer nuts to the snakes for certain obvious reasons. Otherwise I did not fail.

At tea I was lavish, for though Lord Rhondda has barred the conventional

tea of childhood, he has left an opening in the direction of ices, fruit salad, and strawberries and cream. Some day the mothers of England will demand his head on a charger, but I am only an uncle, and my days of England were already numbered.

Phyllis did herself excellently in all the dangerous dainties we could commandeer. Even then I did not tire or faint. I plodded round to the buffaloes and tried to befriend that misanthrope the gnu.

No, it was on the return journey that my troubles began.

The outside of the 'bus was crowded, and Phyllis and I had to wedge ourselves inside among a warm and listless party to whom any diversion was welcome.

A very slender brown hand crept into mine.

Phyllis is a nut-brown maid of six

summers.

"Uncle John."

I looked into gazelle-like brown eyes.

"Well?" I asked.

"Let's talk, shall we?"

"All right, what about?"
"Love."

Six pairs of ears seemed to cock and six pairs of eyes gazed at my goddaughter. She has a soft voice, much like a fairy's, I fancy, but it has a singular power of carrying.

"Phyllis," I said, "don't talk so loudly. You may have one of the chocolate croquettes."

"Oh! Uncle John, thank you, and may I nibble?"

"Of course you may."

I hoped that nibbling would produce silence, and for half a minute it did. I found that my goddaughter's method of nibbling was a mouse-like mode of biting, applied in a rotatory fashion to the chocolate. It was more suitable to the seclusion of the nursery than to the 'bus.

"Do you call that pretty?" she inquired engagingly.

"No."

"Mother doesn't let me do it. You are a kind Uncle John to let me. Do officers ever nibble?"

"Never," I said. The picture of our Colonel and the mess all engaged in nibbling revolted me.

Phyllis smiled sweetly. She had chocolate even in her dimples, and realizing this her tongue became active. "Use your handkerchief," I suggested firmly.

My goddaughter excavated in several layers of white petticoat.

"It's lost," I said, anxious to end the search.

"I think some animal has tooken it," she explained.

"I wiped that reindeer's nose with it, Uncle John. Do you remember? And will you lend me your hankervich?" Phyllis held up my handkerchief that all the world might see it. "It's much more too bigger than mine," she exclaimed.

I am responsible for my godchild's knowledge of the Catechism in the vulgar tongue, but her grammar is outside my province.

"Use it," I commanded, and she wiped her mouth.

An old gentleman got in-to make room for him I took Phyllis on my knee.

To my surprise she made a dive towards the floor and retrieved from somewhere a white bone button.

"I wonder," she said, "if this is mine or somebody else's. I have buttons just like that on my stays."

She smiled genially upon our fellowtravelers. No one claimed the button, so she handed it to me.

"Please put it in your pocket, Uncle John. I think it is mine, because I feel loose somehow. I suppose you haven't got a needle and cotton? If you had we could sew it on now."

I sighed with thankfulness that we had not to cross Piccadilly Circus minus an essential button.

To make a diversion I pointed out to my niece a lady in fine uniform, and asked if Phyllis would choose some profession when she grew to full estate. Phyllis fell into a day-dream, her lovely face a picture of pensive wistfulness.

"When I grow upshe said, and paused to collect all ears, after the manner of Mark Antony.

"When I grow up I'll be a mother. I'm going to have ten little boys and girls-all twins and all dressed in sailor suits. Could you suggest some names, Uncle John? I've got Algernon, Augustus, Semolina, Caroline, Bethunia -but I can't think of any more."

Somebody moved from the little stool at the end. We had, at least, lost one of the audience.

"May I sit on the stool, Uncle John?" Phyllis asked. I agreed warmly. We had, by now, reached the Monument, and there was only London Bridge, and then-the shelter of the station.

...

Phyllis was pensive until she saw the river. She was some way off, and I hoped fondly that our mutual distance would keep her silent. But it was not to be. The river aroused some train of thought. She sprang to her feet.

"Uncle John, Uncle John," she called, "is this the 'Shall-we-gather-atthe-river River?'"

The old gentleman pulled her to his knee with grandfatherly good-will.

"It is, child, it is," he declared. "That's what the German aeroplanes call it, and they do gather by it too!" A little later we were at the station. I was conscious of a great fatigue, such as I had never felt even in France. I led Phyllis aside. She pranced beside me.

The Westminster Gazette.

"Phyllis," I said bitterly, "there was only one thing we forgot-namely, to pass around the hat before we got out."

"Oh, Uncle John, could we have? Like church?"

"We'd have made at least a shilling, and deserved it."

"I wish we had; don't you?"

"After the war, my child, you and I will go round amusing the queues at theatres. That will be an honest livelihood."

"Do you really mean it, Uncle John; do you promise?"

Knowing the awful solemnity of a promise to Phyllis I made a proviso.

"If I'm a Brigadier-General we will. He'd draw, I fancy. But now, Phyllis, I want to talk to you seriously. You shall have any picture book from the stall if you agree to observe strict silence in the train. In my character of temporary captain and temporary gentleman, the King expects me to to go first class. It is, I agree, a little exacting of him. You and I know that I don't go anything but third in ordinary life. But I beg that you will make no open comment on that fact, that you will not ask if I am very rich-I am not. I beg you not to show undue elation at our unusual pomp. In fact, I must ask for your word that you will look at your book and not speak to me all the way."

Phyllis is a lady of strict honor. I saw her in the throes of many struggles with herself, but honor always prevailed. Only at the home station the little hot hand slipped into mine and those enchanting eyes were raised.

"Could we go to the Zoo again next week, Uncle John? I do like going with you. You're so nice to talk to," she declared.

"The King expects me to be in France next week,” said I.

Phyllis sighed.

W. M. Letts.

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