school, let all armies be disbanded and every man Jack set up his equal and equidistant booth in the world's fair,

The Times.

Kipling would still find meat and drink for his art, and in what he has done be as great a man as ever.

When the trout-fisherman sees the first martins and swallows dipping over the sward of the water-meadows and skimming the surface of the stream in hot pursuit of such harried water-insects as have escaped the jaws of greedy fish, he knows that summer is coming in. The signs of spring have been evident in the budding hedgerows for some weeks. The rooks are cawing in the elms, the cuckoo's note has been heard in the spinney for some time before these little visitors pass in jerky flight up and down the valley. Then, a little later, come the swifts-the black and screaming swifts-which, though learned folk may be right in sundering them utterly from their smaller travelling companions from the sunny south, will always in the popular fancy be associated with the rest. Colonies of swifts, swallows, and martins are a dominant feature of English village life during the warm months; and though there are fastidious folk who take not wholly culpable exception to their little visitors on the score of cleanliness, most of us welcome them back each year, if only for the sake of the glad season of their stay. If, moreover, it is a question of choice between these untiring travellers resting in our eaves and the stay-at-home starling or sparrow, the choice will surely fall on the former every time.

The swift is the largest and most rapid in its flight, and its voice has a penetrating quality lacking in the notes of the rest. Swifts screaming in headlong flight about a belfry or up and down a country lane are the em

bodiment of that sheer joy of life which, in some cases with slender reason, we associate peculiarly with the bird-world. Probably, however, these summer migrants are as happy as most of their class. On the wing they can have few natural enemies, though one may now and again be struck down by a hawk; and they alight on the ground so rarely as to run little risk from cats or weasels, while the structure and position of their nests alike afford effectual protection for the eggs and young. Compared with that of the majority of small birds, therefore, their existence should be singularly happy and free from care; and though that of the swift can scarcely, perhaps, when we remember its shrill voice, be described as one grand sweet song, it should not be checkered by many troubles. The greatest risk is no doubt that of being snapped up by some watchful pike if the bird skims too closely to the surface of either still or running water, and I have even heard of their being seized in this way by hungry mahseer, those great barbel which gladden the heart of exiled anglers whose lot is cast on the banks of Himalayan rivers

It is however the sparrows and starlings, rivals for the nesting sites, who show themselves the irreconcilable enemies of the returned prodigals. Terrific battles are continually enacted between them with varying fortunes, and the anecdotes of these frays would fill a volume. Jesse tells of a feud at Hampton Court, in the course of which the swallows, having only then completed their nest, were evicted

by sparrows, who forthwith took possession and hatched out their eggs. Then came Nemesis, for the sparrows were compelled to go foraging for food with which to fill the greedy beaks, and during their enforced absence the swallows returned in force, threw the nestlings out, and demolished the home. The sparrows sought other quarters, and the swallows triumphantly built a new nest on the ruins of the old. A German writer relates a case of revolting reprisal on the part of some swallows against a sparrow which appropriated their nest and refused to quit. After repeated failure to evict the intruder, the swallows, helped by other members of the colony, calmly plastered up the front door so effectually that the unfortunate sparrow was walled up alive and died of hunger. This refined mode of torture is not unknown in the history of mankind, but seems singularly unsuited to creatures so fragile.

The nests of these birds show, as a rule, little departure from the conventional plan, but they do adapt their architecture to circumstances, and I remember being much struck on one occasion by the absence of any dome or roof. It was in Asia Minor, on the seashore, that I came upon a cottage long deserted, its door hanging by one hinge, and all the glass gone from the windows. In the empty rooms numerous swallows were rearing twittering broods in roofless nests. No doubt the birds realized that they had nothing to fear from rain, and were reluctant to waste time and labor in covering their homes with unnecessary roofs.

Most birds are careful in the education of their young, and indeed thorough training at an early stage must be essential in the case of creatures that are left to protect themselves and to find their own food when only a few weeks old. Fortunately they de

velop with a rapidity that puts man and the other mammals to shame, and the helpless bald little swift lying agape in the nest will in another fortnight be able to fly across Europe. One of the most favored observers of the early teaching given by the mother-swallow to her brood was an angler, who told me how, one evening when he was fishing in some ponds at no great distance from London, a number of baby swallows alighted on his rod. He kept as still as possible, fearful of alarming his interesting visitors, but he must at last have moved, for, with one accord, they all fell off his rod together, skimmed over the surface of the water, and disappeared in the direction from which they had come a few moments earlier.

Swifts fly to an immense height in the July evenings, mounting to such an altitude as eventually to disappear out of sight altogether. This curious habit, which is but imperfectly understood, has led us to the belief that, instead of roosting in the nest or among the reeds like the swallows, the males, at any rate, spend the night flying about under the stars. This fantastic notion is not however likely to commend itself to those who pause to reflect on the incessant activity displayed by these birds the livelong day. So rarely indeed do they alight that country folk gravely deny them the possession of feet, and it is in the last degree improbable that a bird of such feverish alertness could dispense with its night's rest. No one who has watched swifts, swallows, and martins on the wing can fail to be struck by the extraordinary judgment with which these untiring birds seem to shave the arches of bridges, gateposts, and other obstacles in the way of their flight by so narrow a margin as continually to give the impression of catastrophe imminent and inevitable. Their escapes from collision are

marvellous; but the birds are not infallible, as is shown by the untoward fate of a swallow in Sussex. In an old garden in that county there had for many years been an open doorway with no door, and through the open space the swallows had been wont, year after year, to fly to and fro on their hunting trips. Then came a fateful winter during which a new owner took it into his head to put up a new gate and to keep it locked, and, as ill luck would have it, he painted it blue, which, in the season of fine weather, probably heightened the illusion. Back came the happy swallows to their old playground, and one of the pioneers flew headlong at the closed gate and fell stunned and dying on the ground, a minor tragedy that may possibly come as a surprise to those who regard the instincts of wild birds as unerring.

that "one swallow does not make a summer," and it was no doubt this occasional apparition that in a less enlightened age seemed to warrant the extraordinary belief, which still ekes out a precarious existence in misinformed circles, that these birds, instead of wintering abroad, retire in a torpid condition to the bottom of lakes and ponds. It cannot be denied that these waters have occasionally, when dredged or drained, yielded a stray skeleton of a swallow, but it should be evident to the most homely intelligence that such débris merely indi- . cates careless individuals that, in passing over the water, got their plumage waterlogged and were then drowned. It seems strange that Gilbert White, so accurate an observer of birds, should actually have toyed with this curious belief, though he leaned rather to the more reasonable version of occasional hibernation in caves or other sheltered hiding-places. The rustic mind however preferred, and in some unsophisticated districts still prefers, the ancient belief in diving swallows, and no weight of evidence, however carefully presented, would shake it in its creed. Fortunately this eccentric view of the swallow's habits brings no harm to the bird itself, and may thus be tolerated as an innocuous indulgence on the part of those who prefer this fiction to the even stranger truth.

We have before us two books of intense interest. "The Jews and Modern Capitalism," by Prof. Sombart, is writ

"The Jews and Modern Capitalism." By Werner Sambart. Translated with Notes by M. Epstein. (Fisher Unwin.)

"The Jews of To-day." By Dr. Arthur Ruppin. Translated from the German by Margery Bentwich. With an Introduction by Joseph Jacobs. (Bell and Sons.)

F. G. Aflalo.

ten with a brilliance not often associated with economic treatises, and its speculations may well fascinate if they fail to convince. Dr Ruppin in "The Jews of To-day" is not concerned with speculative theory, but very seriously concerned with the fate of the Jewish race. Prof. Sombart seeks to

establish no less a proposition than that Judaism and capitalism are one, and that the commercial progress of nations has been an expression of the presence and activity of Jews. Dr. Ruppin, alarmed by the many evidences of the assimilation of the Jews by the peoples amongst whom they dwell, writes as an ardent Zionist, who has himself lived in Palestine for some years, and he dreams of a new Zion whose mission it is in his own significant words, "to be the last desperate stand of the Jews against annihilation." Prof. Sombart writes of the Jew as conqueror, as holding civilization in golden chains. Dr. Ruppin writes of him as threatened with absorption by the civilizations in which his extraordinary gifts have served him so well.

Prof. Sombart has a triumphant way with him which enables him to surmount any difficulty which confronts his thesis. Everywhere and in every age, the presence or the absence of the Jew explains, on the one hand, commercial prosperity, and, on the other, commercial lethargy or decline. Was Venice great, it was that Venice that cherished, or at least tolerated, the Jew. Did Venice decline, it was because the Jew departed. Did Columbus disover America; he did it with Jewish money-nay! is there not very good reason to believe him no Genoese, but a Jew? Did the English gain a new prosperity in the eighteenth century; it was not due to the discovery of the proper use of coal, as Jevons would have us believe, but is owing to the Jews. Did Spain lose her commercial importance; that importance departed with the departure of the Jews. Thus also you shall explain the decline of Portugal and the rise of the Dutch. We are to picture the Jew as ever gilding the land of the Gentile, and the Gentile, with varying wisdom, as sometimes tolerating and sometimes rejecting the good gift; it never ap

pears that the Jew has been welcomed as the benefactor which this theory would prove him to be. The professor disarms the critic by his naive and confident expressions. This is how he attacks us (the italics are ours):—

"Cannot we bring into connection the shifting of the economic centre from Southern to Northern Europe with the wanderings of the Jews? The mere suggestion at once throws a flood of light on the events of those days, hitherto shrouded in semi-darkness. It is indeed surprising that the parallelism has not before been observed between Jewish wanderings and settlement on the one hand, and the economic vicissitudes of the different peoples and states on the other. Israel passes over Europe like the sun: at its coming new life bursts forth; at its going all falls into decay."

A page or two further on he writes:

"Our intention is to do no more than ask a question or two, and here and there to suggest an answer. We want merely to set the reader thinking. It will be for later research to gather sufficient material by which to judge whether, and to what extent, the views as to cause and effect here propounded have any foundation in actual fact."

That is the method of the book: "Cannot we bring into connection?" The theory is propounded, and every suitable fact, or guess at a suitable fact, which can be raked together is advanced to make a case. It does not apparently occur to the professor to "ask a question or two" of his readers -to suggest to their minds that it would be well in such a connection to consider the natural resources of nations, and the change in the economic outlook of various parts of the world which ensued upon the discovery of the use of coal-power. Readers might suggest to him that the simultaneous presence in any country of wealth and the Jew may possibly mean that wealth came with the Jew, but may just as possibly mean that the Jew came after

the wealth. It is not, perhaps, surprising that Prof. Sombart treats with superficiality the rise of England in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it is to be feared that if he had given more attention to the rootcause it would not have helped his theory. The rise of modern England, as Jevons has justly indicated, was directly due to English, not to Jewish talent. The Jew hastened to the scene of exploitation. Nevertheless we can journey part of the way with Prof. Sombart. The fierce intellectuality of the Jew, his most striking characteristic, has everywhere made him a prime personal factor in commerce.

Dr Ruppin gives us some deeply interesting statistics relating to the Jews, whom he puts at nearly twelve millions, and to the decline in the Jewish birth-rate, the increase of Jewish emigration, and the increasing tendency of prosperous Jews to intermarry with the Gentiles. Dr. Ruppin sees clearly a fact which Prof. Sombart might well consider in relation to his pet theory. It is that there are more poor Jews in the world than rich Jews, and that the extreme poverty of the race in agricultural countries shows that the Jew no more than the Gentile can make silk purses out of

This important tendency in its turn disposes, it is to be feared, of the main hope of Zionism. For what is Palestine? It is a country without the natural resources needed to maintain industry, and fitted at the best to sustain an insignificant agricultural population. Thus Zionism hopes to found a new centre and rallying-ground for Jewish nationalism in a part of the world peculiarly ill-suited to Jewish attributes. The true Promised Land of the Jew would appear to be, not a poor agricultural country, but a rich industrial nation forming a happy hunting-ground for the commercial spirit. It is to be feared, therefore, that Dr. Ruppin speaks with good reason of Zionism as a "desperate stand." A land which has neither coal nor iron, good harbors nor navigable rivers, and is far from centres of communication, is ill-chosen as the new home of any poor people, and least of all the Jews.

The Athenæum.

L