ulation. What they could do was to prevent any sudden shock of invasion and any dislocation of their mobilization by adding to the number of men actually with the Colors, but this could only be done by increasing the time of service, and a Commission appointed by the Government decided that this period of service with the Colors should be increased from two years to three. It further determined (which is the crux of the whole matter) that the men who were to have been freed next Autumn should be kept with the Colors for another year. It asked that discredited organ of legislation, the Chamber of Deputies, to vote this policy in principle, and later to embody it in a law. The immediate effect of this proposal was to create a strong opposition within the Chamber. It furnished the first opportunity for division which the Parliamentarians had had since the Dreyfus business and the laws confiscating the property of such persons as might have taken religious Vows in the Catholic Church. There bappened what always happens in a Parliament nowadays, a flood of talk beginning insincerely and becoming half sincere as it proceeded. Meanwhile, the discussion of the division having once been started, all those elements in the country which disapproved of the extension of military service rallied, and a genuine opposition formed amid the public. It includes no very great minority of the nation, but one sufficiently strong to make itself felt, and one the nature of which is complicated, because it does not so much divide one man from another as a part of each man from another part of himself.

To everyone in the country the law appears as an exceedingly grave and very hard measure. To the great majority of the country this hard and even cruel order-however necessarycomes from men whom the country

thoroughly despise, and from an organ of Government which has lost every shred of moral authority. The great bulk of Frenchmen are in a mood which a gust' might turn against the national duty at this moment. But apart from this, there are certain bodies of opinion definitely opposed to the law. There are in the first place a great number of thoughtful men in the better educated and wealthier classes, who do not think that a full three years is necessary, and who believe that keeping the men now with the Colors for another six months, while the recruits are being trained, is all that need be asked for. It should be noted that this body of opinion includes not a few officers. Less important though very strictly organized, is the conscious Socialist vote of the country-using the word Socialist in the English sense of Collectivist and Internationalist. This body has not only got strict organization, but great wealth, and, what is of more value than either in any struggle, conviction.

Then you have the fact that to all the men actually subject to the extension of time-that is, to the whole of the rank and file of the army, and especially to the second half, which has already served for nearly two years,the sense of oppression is almost intolerable. The whole of a young man's life in France is calculated upon the date of his release from service, and the date is looked forward to and counted on with an eagerness that perhaps no other event in the life of most men can excite.

Finally, an argument has been used which has had great weight in the last few days. It has been said that the President of the Republic promised the Russian Government that the reform should go through, and that it is on account of this pledge that the Government will not listen to Opposition arguments. All nations resent foreign

interference, and it seems particularly harsh that these young men should be sacrificed for the interests of a Power that does not impose universal service itself, and which is already possessed of such huge armaments.

This statement, however, must not be taken as true. It may be true, but there is this to be said against its authenticity, that it has arisen and has been repeated in circles where lies are, so to speak, a daily food. It is in particular to be noticed that the printed sheets which repeated it in England were the same as those that printed the most glaring falsehoods during the separation of Church and State in France, and this sudden appearance of such statements, especially in those sections of the English Press, always means that they have been sent out by order from some secret international centre.

To sum up, one may take it that with considerable friction, at the risk even of rare mutiny and of very active and widespread disaffection, the men who should have been released next Autumn will be retained with the Colors at least until next April. But that is the least certain, as it is the most perilous part of the business.

The second point is more certain, and will be carried with less friction. The three years service for the young men who have not yet been summoned will certainly be imposed. The harshness of the measure will not be felt in anything like the same degree as the retention in the barrack room of men who have already suffered its severe discipline for two years and were confidently expecting release.

Now for the third point, which is the most important of all. It has been stated before in these pages, and it is of capital importance to Englishmen. This effort upon the part of the French means, as a matter of almost physical necessity, one of two things within the

The New Witness.

next three years: Disarmament in the West of Europe, or war. It is quite impossible that civilized Europe should admit the threat of a large Prussian army organized for purposes that bring good to no one, and only do evil to section after section of European life; should admit that threat permanently, and should neither counter-balance it nor attempt to destroy it. If Prussia had shown any capacity for governing (and, therefore, reconciling) the populations she proposes to oppress, and notably the Polish population upon the subjugation of which she has foolishly based her policy, a great numerical superiority in her forces would be another matter. But since every year that passes makes it more difficult for the Prussian Government to do as it wills in Poland, in the provinces annexed from France, and, for that matter, in its internal struggle against organized Catholicism, since also its foreign policy consists in little more beyond further threats against districts still free, an hegemony of the kind that is now sought for the first time in thirty years will certainly not be admitted. On the other hand, it is equally certain that the French have no intention of standing for very long this strain of the new military conditions. They will still have a numerical superiority over the German forces for three years more; they will certainly have a superiority in their fortified works, an overwhelming superiority in the efficiency of their artillery, and in each particular branch of their service they are conscious of a similar superiority. Their one element of weakness on the military side is that politically they are a Democracy. In everything else, even in numbers, they will, for just this short period, have the advantage, and it is impossible to believe that this will not be utilized to relieve the strain one way or the other.

The majority of nocturnal animals, more particularly those bent on spoliation, are strangely silent. True, frogs eroak in the marshes, bats shrill overhead at so high a pitch that some folks cannot hear them, and owls hoot from their ruins in a fashion that some vote melodious and romantic, while others associate the sound rather with midnight crime and dislike it accordingly. The badger, on the other hand, with the otter and fox-all of them sad thieves from our point of view-have learnt, whatever their primeval habits, to go about their marauding stealthy silence; and it is only in less settled regions that one hears the jackals barking, the hyænas howling, and the browsing deer whistling through the night watches.

in

There are, however, two of our native birds, or rather summer visitors, since they leave us in autumn. closely associated with the warm June nights, the stillness of which they break in very different fashion, and these are the nightingale and nightjar. Each is of considerable interest in its own way. It is not to be denied that the churring note of the nightjar is, to ordinary ears, the reverse of attractive, and the bird is not much more pleasing to the eye than to the ear; while the nightingale, on the contrary, produces such sweet sounds as made Izaak Walton marvel what music God could provide for His saints in heaven when He gave such as this to sinners on earth. The suggestion was not wholly his own, since the father of angling borrowed it from a French writer; but he vastly improved on the original, and the passage will long live in the hearts of thousands who care not a jot for his instructions in respect of worms. At the same time, the nightjar, though the less at

tractive bird of the two, is fully as interesting as its comrade of the summer darkness, and there should be no difficulty in indicating the little that they have in common, as well as much wherein they differ, in both habits and appearance.

Both, then, are birds of sober attire. Indeed, of the two, the nightjar, with its soft and delicately pencilled plumage and the conspicuous white spots, is perhaps the handsomer, though, as it is seen only in the gloaming, its quiet beauty is but little appreciated. The unobtrusive dress of the nightingale, on the other hand, is familiar in districts in which the bird abounds, and is commonly quoted, by contrast with its unrivalled voice, as the converse of the gaudy coloring of raucous macaws and parrakeets. As has been said, both these birds are summer migrants, the nightingale arriving on our shores about the middle of April, the nightjar perhaps a fortnight later. Thenceforth, however, their programmes are wholly divergent, for, whereas the nightjars proceed to scatter over the length and breadth of Britain, penetrating even to Ireland in the west and as far north as the Hebrides, the nightingale stops far short of these extremes and leaves whole counties of England, as well as probably the whole of Scotland, and certainly the whole of Ireland, out of its calculations. It is however well known that its range is slowly but surely increasing towards the west.

This curiously restricted distribution of the nightingale, indeed, within the limits of its summer home is among the most remarkable of the many problems confronting the student of distribution, and successive ingenious but unconvincing attempts to explain its seeming eccentricity, or at

any rate caprice, in the choice of its nesting range only make the confusion worse. Briefly, in spite of a number of doubtful and even suspicious reports of the bird's occurrence outside of these boundaries, it is generally agreed by the soundest observers that its travels do not extend much north of the city of York, or much west of a line drawn through Exeter and Birmingham. By way of complicating the argument, we know, on good authority, that the nightingale's range is equally peculiar elsewhere; and that, whereas it likewise shuns the departments in the extreme west of France, it occurs all over the Peninsula, a region extending considerably farther into the sunset than either Brittany or Cornwall, in both of which it is unknown. No satisfactory explanation of the little visitor's objection to Wild Wales or Cornwall has been found, and it may at once be stated that its capricious distribution cannot be accounted for by any known facts of soil, climate, or vegetation, since the surroundings which it finds suitable in Kent and Sussex are equally to be found down in the West Country, but fail to attract their share of nightingales.

The song of the nightingale, in praise of which volumes have been written, is perhaps more beautiful than that of any other bird, though I have heard wonderful efforts from the mocking-bird in the United States and from the bulbuls along the banks of the Jordan. The latter are sometimes, more especially in poetry, regarded as identical with the nightingale; and, indeed, some ornithologists hold the two to be closely related. What a gap there is between the sobbing cadences of the nightingale and the rasping note of the nightjar, which, with specific reference to a Colonial cousin of that bird, Tasmanians ingeniously render as "more pork"! It seems al

most ludicrous to include under the head of bird-song not only the music of the nightingale, but also the croak of the raven and the booming note of the ostrich. Yet these also are the love-songs of their kind, and the hen ostrich doubtless finds more music in the thunderous note of her lord than in the faint melody of such song-birds as her native Africa provides. The nightingale sings to his mate while she is sitting on her olive-green eggs, perching on a low branch of the tree, at foot of which the slender nest is hidden in the undergrowth. So much is known to every schoolboy, who is too often guided by the sound on his errand of plunder; and why the song of this particular warbler should have been described by so many writers as one of sadness, seeing that it is associated with the most joyous days in the bird's year, passes comprehension. So obviously is its object to hearten the female in her long and patient vigil that, as soon as the young are hatched, the male's voice breaks, like that of other choristers, to a guttural croak. It is said, indeed-though so cruel an experiment would not appeal to many-that if the nest be destroyed just as the young are hatched the bird recovers all his sweetness of voice and sings anew while another home is built.

Although poetic license has ascribed the song to the female, it is the male nightingale only that sings, and for the purpose afore-mentioned. The note of the nightjar, on the other hand, is equally uttered by both sexes, and both also have the curious habit of repeatedly clapping the wings for several minutes together. They moreover share the business of incubation, taking day and night duty on the eggs, which, two in number, are laid on the bare ground without any pretence at a nest, and generally on open commons in the neighborhood of patches of fern

brake. Like the owls, these birds sleep during the day and are active only when the sun goes down. It is this habit of seeking their insect food only in the gloaming which makes nightjars among the most difficult of birds to study from life, and all accounts of their feeding habits must therefore be received with caution, particularly that which compares the bristles on the mouth with baleen in whales, serving as a sort of strainer for the capture of minute flying prey. This is an interesting suggestion, and may even be sober fact; but its adoption would necessitate the bird flying open-mouthed among the oaks and other trees beneath which it finds the yellow underwings and cockchafers on which it feeds, and I have more than once watched it hunting its victims with the beak closed. I noticed this particularly when camping in the backwoods of Eastern Canada, where the bird goes by the name of "nighthawk."

In all probability its food consists exclusively of insects, though exceptional cases have been noted in which the young birds had evidently been The Outlook.

fed on seeds. The popular error which charges it with stealing the milk of ewes and goats, from which it derives the undeserved name of "goat-sucker," Iwith its equivalent in several Continental languages, is another result of the imperfect light in which it is commonly observed. Needless to say, there is no truth whatever in the accusation, for the nightjar would find no more pleasure in drinking milk than we should in eating moths.

Here, then, are two night-voices of very different calibre. These are not our only birds that break the silence on moonlight nights in June. The common thrush often sings far into the night, and the sedge-warbler is a persistent caroller that has often been mistaken for the nightingale. The difference in this respect between the two subjects of these remarks is that the nightjar is invariably silent all through the day, whereas the nightingale sings joyously at all hours. It is only because his splendid music is more marked in the comparative silence of the night, with little or no competition, that his daylight concert is often overlooked.

F. G. Aflalo.

Man does not know much by instinct. Some men do not even know their own mind. It is one of the things no one can learn to know. It is a knowledge which comes naturally, or, to use an antithetic but in this case almost synonymous term, by inspiration. A vast number of people, as soon as they are grown up, plunge into the world, not knowing what they want out of it, just as many women plunge into shops. The good bargains of life are not for them. Does this piece of gratuitous knowledge the

knowledge of what they want-imparted by Providence to about half one's acquaintance as a birthright, bring happiness or not? In the view of the present writer it is nearly impossible to say. Those who know what they want and get it are, in spite of the instructions of our childhood, generally quite happy. Those who know and do not get it are often quite miserable. Those who do not know suffer the least. There can be no doubt

of that. Unfortunately in this very strange world almost all the situations