OLGA NETHERSOLE'S OSCULATION.

OLGA NETHERSOLE is an emotional actress who has achieved the hitherto unheard-of-has accomplished the impossible. She has actually succeeded in shocking New York. The American metropolis, which has long prided itself on its ability to go all the gaits, is compelled to admit that, as a pace-setter, Olga picks 'em up too fast and puts 'em down too far apart. Even the Four Hundred, whose female contingent is playing Madame Potiphar to the Joseph of Paderewski,-and which, in the acute phase of its physical culture fad, slobbered over Roby, the wrestling ape, and bribed a bathhouse porter to cut holes in a screen that it might feast its languishing eyes on Sandow's naked loveliness-has been made to redden beneath its rouge. New York could stand all the 66 Living Pictures," from Leda and her libidinous Swan, to Europa and the celestial Bull; it did not object to French farce nor see anything particularly off color in Yvette Guilbert's Solomonic songs; but Olga has made it admit that there may be too much even of a bad thing. And she accomplished this remarkable feat while clothed, if not exactly in her right mind; which recalls the proposition of De Maurier that nudity is synonymous with sexual purity and apparel provocative of passion. New York was beginning to suspect the creator of the hoof craze to be half right in declaring a naked woman such a fright "that Don Juan himself were fain to hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes,” and had withdrawn its patronage from the louder of the "Living Pictures," leaving the speaking canvas and pulsing marble to the wondering gaze of guileless Reubens and country preachers eagerly seeking moral elevation in this daring school of modern art. It was by the invention of a pecu

liarly sensuous and suggestive kiss-a kind of lingering sweetness long drawn out-that Miss Nethersole shocked New York. Olga's patent appears to be a symposium of the dreamy abandon of the Abbott buss, the passionate swoop of the Tempest osculation and the "shudder and groan " that has made the lip-service of Ella Wheeler a sensuous nightmare to romantic chambermaids. "With her arms locked tightly around her leading man's neck," says a correspondent of that great family journal, the Dallas News, "the libidinous Olga groans and gurgles, twists and trembles, and says: 'More! More! Closer! Closer!' when the poor fellow is already stifled with kisses and nearly squeezed into a jelly. I do not wonder that even the American Gomorrah is shocked, disgusted, inclined to go down to the East River and disgorge its dinner. When a woman is so far gone that she " groans and gurgles, twists and trembles; " when she makes a frantic effort to swallow her sweetheart and then sit down on him, the audience should remember that "two's company and three's a crowd." "Actual adultery, committed like the sin of Absalom, in sight of all Israel, were purity by comparison with the degraded animalism attributed to this actress. It is a species of self-pollution practiced only by those suffering with moral syphilis. Miss Nethersole should be encased in cracked ice for a few days, and the male party who permits her to utilize him as an excuse for her lascivious day-dreams, should go forth and die. The kiss was originally but a mode of salutation among men, like the touching of noses or the shaking of hands. It was a token of respect or love, not an evocator of passion, the handmaid of lust. It was not until the days of Roman degeneracy that it was utilized to minister to the carnal pleasure of the physically incapable and morally unfitthat it was made the means of artificial prostitution by

those whose devotion was but dalliance and whose passion were pruriency. The kiss of Miss Nethersole is but a differentiation of those unnatural debaucheries for which Onan was damned and Sodom destroyed. She is doubtless a clever actress who is giving the decadents of New York a glimpse of themselves as others see them-holding the mirror up to those desiring damsels who would "eat their cake and have it too." But her realism does not provide a valid excuse. That young women of professed respectability do grab their "mashes," groan and gurgle, writhe and wriggle, demand added pressure and additional tuttifrutti, and call it beatific love instead of unbridled concupiscence, confers upon an actress no right to reproduce upon the stage such outbursts of degraded animalism. She might as well commit a homicide or produce an abortion. There are some things too vile to be portrayed by an actress before a mixed audience, however devoted she be to art.

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BRITISH VS. BOERS.

THE British press insists that the American people are heartily in sympathy with England in the matter of the Anglo-Boer imbroglio. If so, they have been misled by megalophanous Anglomaniacs, the feature of whose education is that

"Old England's always right."

Uncle Sam really knows little about the troubles of the Transvaal, having early acquired the habit of attending pretty strictly to affairs affecting only the Western Hemisphere. When great English dailies allude to "the city of Illinois in the State of Chicago," the "bahbaous

Hamewicans" could scarce be hexpected to know much about petty republics situated at the antipodes. Those Americans who are familiar with affairs in the Transvaal do not sit up o' nights to mourn because John Bull's stuffed lion has been again disemboweled. His cowardly attempt upon the autonomy of the South African Republic was equaled in infamy only by the futile effort of President Cleveland to make the Liberty-loving Hawaiians submit to the yoke of a yaller prostitute. Holland was once a powerful commercial rival of England; but when overrun by the French revolutionists, John Bull, ever ready to profit by the misfortunes of others, seized upon her colonial possessions. The extreme Southern portion of Africa had been settled by sturdy Hollanders, and, like the American colonists, they found the British yoke unbearable. Being too few in number to follow the American example, to take the royal beast of Britain by the beard and cuff it into good behavior-the Boers migrated to Natal, drove out the Zulus and erected another political roof-tree. The British pursued them and again seized upon their possessions. Determined not to abide beneath the flag that had become the ensign of robbery, the emblem of oppression, they plunged still farther into the wilderness, founded the Orange Free State and the Transvaal or South African Republic. In 1876 they became involved in a bloody war with various savage tribes, and England, true to her old instincts of despoilation, seized this opportunity to make the Transvaal a British province. The Boers appealed to the mother country for aid; but Holland had been ruined by the conscienceless duplicity and abnormal greed of her old rival-her navy, that once rode secure in the shadow of London Tower, had been reduced to the "Flying Dutchman," her busy marts of trade became "the dead cities of the Zuyder Zee." Despairing of aid from without, the

brave Boers shouldered their rifles, rallied round the flag of their little Republic and soon made a monkey of Britain's marauding beast. The lion poked his nose into the nest of hornets just once, then hastened to patch up a peace on practically the same terms that followed the little affair at Yorktown. It found the Boers almost as expert with powder and lead as those who "chiseled hell's bells " out of Packenham's veterans at New Orleans. Two years later the discovery of rich gold fields in the Transvaal again excited British cupidity. Having failed to get possession of the country by force, John Bull now resorted to fraud. Thousands of British adventurers were encouraged to migrate thither. Without making the slightest pretense of renouncing their allegiance to the Queen, they demanded the right of representation in the affairs of government. Quite naturally this was denied them. They next conspired to overthrow the Republic by revolution. A large armed force was to be raised in the British provinces for the invasion of the Transvaal, where it would be augmented by the uitlanders, or foreigners. Dr. Jameson led on the invaders in conformity with the conspiracy, but the Boers, though vastly outnumbered, adopted such vigorous measures that the English residents-who failed to draw the American gold miners into the revoltwere completely cowed and failed to give him the expected support. Jameson's column of freebooters was thus left at the mercy of the Boers, whose trusty rifles soon put a kibosh on the revolution. The savage African tribes had been tampered with by these conspirators against the Republic, and had promised to render the same assistance that the murderous red-skins did the British during our own revolution, but were over-awed by the disaster that befell their "Christian" allies and held their peace. Had Jameson not been signally defeated in the first fight, these black