But the imp in "Laddie" is a boy, and from one of his performances, let all be divined. He is reciting texts in Sunday school, and, instead of the decorous two expected of him, he presents thirteen beginning with "Jesus wept" and adding twelve, each one aimed straight at some member of the congregation. His father contrives to turn his devices to the general good, and the scene ends in a praise meeting, and all the foolishness and knavishness in the story is similarly transformed until nothing but happiness is possible and everybody begins to enjoy it. This disposal of destinies is of course borrowed from the French, but is there anything good in American or English fiction that is not borrowed from the French, who borrow from the Hebrew and from the Greek, the three agreeing that there is nothing new under the sun? "Laddie" is excellent comedy. Doubleday, Page & Company. There are two very strong persons in Frances Nimmo Greene's novel "The Right of the Strongest," and there are two strong opposing causes, each with its champions. One of the persons is a young school teacher, Mary Elizabeth Dale, who has been educated by a philanthropist on the understanding that she go back to her people in the mountains of Alabama and devote her life to them. The other is John Marshall, who comes to the mountain community where Mary Elizabeth is teaching for the purpose of acquiring land for a great money making project. The ancestors of the mountaineers in this place failed to register their claims to the land which they settled, and it is John Marshall's idea to force the unsuspecting and independent folk out of their homes, and to seize their lands. Mary Elizabeth and Marshall are attracted to each other, but the woman naturally cham From melodrama to farce is so long a step that Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim's readers will be greatly surprised to find that he has taken it in planning his latest book, "The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton," still more surprised, perhaps, to find that the farce becomes the vehicle of a moral lesson, apparently almost in spite of its writer. The impossible element is, however, even more important in the plot than in novels of any of the species produced by Mr. Oppenheim in earlier days, and, thanks to this, he loses none of his power to attract and retain attention. Mr. Alfred Burton, endowed with the superhuman attribute of deciding his own destiny, by choosing which of two temperaments shall direct his behavior, must inevitably play the clown, but is very nearly pathetic, so grievously is his soul racked by the difficulties of his position. As for the reader, so swiftly are the colored lights changed that he hardly knows at what kind of histrionics he is gazing, and doubts whether to be severely reprehensive or gently approving, and reads the story at least twice to decide. Even Mr. Oppenheim can hardly be expected to produce a second novel in this manner, but Mr. Alfred Burton is perfectly adapted to amuse his audience for a while. Little, Brown & Co. FROM BEGINNING VOL. CCLXXVIII SEVENTH SERIES No. 3611 September 20, 1913 { CONTENTS 1. Japan's Status Among the Nations. By Saint Nihal Singh. LONDON QUarterly REVIEW 707 Anarchy. By Helen Hester Colvill. John Cope's Year at Oxford. Chapter I. (To be concluded.) TIMES 724 XI. X. The Creator of German Socialism. SATURDAY REVIEW 763 OUTLOOK 765 XIV. From the Greek Anthology. Translated by Harold F. Andersen. FOR SIX DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage, to any part of the United States. To Canada the postage is 50 cents per annum. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office or express money order if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, express and money orders should be made payable to the order of THE LIVING AGE CO. Single Copies of THE LIVING AGE, 15 cents. ST. MARY'S BELLS It's pleasant in Holy Mary The bells they chime and jingle They rhyme and chime and mingle, Oh, who are the men that ring them, Oh, who but sonsie seamen To hear the beaten bells JAPAN'S STATUS AMONG THE NATIONS.* I. What is Japan's status in the comity of the enlightened nations of the world? Have her victories on the battlefield and sea, coupled with her peaceful progress, secured for her a position of honor among the great Powers and entitled her citizens to treatment equal to that accorded to natives of the various Occidental countries? Or is she still an inferior race, somewhat superior to the other Asiatic peoples to be sure, but nevertheless occupying a rank below that of the members of the Western Concert? These questions have been incessantly asked by both Orientals and Occidentals ever since the days when the soldiers and sailors of Japan grappled with Russia's land and sea forces. They have elicited much discussion, and have been answered by a host of writers, white and yellow, who have published numerous monographs relating to the transition through which the Island Empire has been passing. An indirect reply has been vouchsafed by the treaties which Japan has been able to secure from the Powers, and the manner in which the Nipponese diplomats, financiers, commercialists, students, and immi"Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation." By Lafcadio Hearn. (Macmillan & Co., 1904.) "Japan by the Japanese." Edited by Alfred Stead. (Heinemann, 1904.) "Great Japan." By Alfred Stead. (Heinemann, 1905.) "Things Japanese." By Basil Hall Chamberlain. (John Murray, 1905.) "Japanese Education." By Baron Kikuchi. (Murray, 1909.) "Fifty Years of New Japan (Ráikoku Gojunen Shi)." Compiled by Count Shigenobu Okuma. English version, edited by Marcus B. Huish. 2 vols. (Smith, Elder & Co., second edition, 1910.) "The Full Recognition of Japan." By Robert P. Porter. (Oxford Univer grants have been treated in foreign lands. However, when we come to dissect these answers, what do we find? Most, of the books on Japan that are available are trashy, unreliable, and not worthy of the slightest notice. The few volumes that merit recognition do, indeed, give us much valuable information regarding the march of the Oriental nation on the path of progress: but some err by lauding the accomplishments of the Japanese to the skies, and others by disparaging their modernization as a mere surface veneer; on the one hand depicting the Nipponese as being equal in every way to the most enlightened of peoples, and on the other describing them as semi-barbarians. The number of works which are really discriminating is extremely limited. Therefore going through the conclusions arrived at either in the spirit of idolatry or of racial prejudice leaves one bewildered in a jungle of words. when Similarly, the indirect reply, analyzed, gives us but a confused notion of the existing state of affairs. So far as the Japanese treaties with the Powers go, the old, humiliating conditions requiring that Japan should not levy more than a small impost (five per cent ad valorem) upon imports from Europe and America, and that she should exempt aliens living within her borders from the operations of her criminal laws, allowing them to be tried entirely by their own consular courts; which deprived her of the power of fiscal autonomy, subjected her to the interference of Western diplomats who, by nature of their office, had to be the henchmen of the commercialists of their own nations, and who, in some instances, were traders themselves, and laid her open to the anomaly of harboring foreigners within her gates who were altogether out from under her jurisdiction, have been obliterated, once for all. Indeed, the agreements that Japan has recently been able to make with the Western nations enable her citizens and traders to enjoy rights and privileges similar to those which she has conceded to the subjects of those countries within her territories. These treaties, when examined in the light of the treatment accorded by the civilized world to Nippon's diplomatic agents and commercialists, distinctly signify that the Daybreak Empire is not a pariah amongst the Powers. a blaze. But the position of Nipponese immigrants in those portions of the world generally considered by the white man to be his own preserves has, to say the least, remained anomalous. The recent action taken by the State Legislature of California, U. S. A., in passing an Act which is principally aimed at keeping the Japanese from acquiring land within its jurisdiction, carried the discrimination against the Mikado's subjects to a point which it never before has reached in America. As a conse quence, meetings have been held in Japan to protest against the stigma of inferiority being cast upon the Nipponese by the action of California, and there has even been talk of settling accounts with those who have offered affront by this measure. Just what action the United States Federal authorities propose to take in the matter, or what they will be able to do to assuage the hurt Nipponese feelings, is not yet known, and is relatively immaterial to our immediate purpose. The way matters stand at present, the Japanese-despite legal fictions and despite the fact that they do not pay a head-tax, as the Chinese do when they enter British Columbia, for instance do not enjoy an immigration status equal to the lowest and leastcivilized of Europeans. But the minute we begin to investigate the attitude of the British Colonies and the United States of America towards the Japanese immigrants, this assurance disappears almost to the vanishing point. The Nipponese are deemed undesirable in Australia, in British Columbia, and throughout the Western portion of the United States, where the authorities, overtly or covertly, actively or passively, are resisting their entry and seeking to prevent them from acquiring property rights. Until quite lately the statesmanship shown so conspicuously by Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt during their incumbency of the Premiership of Canada and the Presidency of the United States of America in restraining the provincial and State authorities under their respective control from taking any action which would sting the national susceptibilities of Japan to the point of inciting her to engage in an avenging war, and the disposition to pour oil on the troubled waters displayed by Dai Nippon, which led her to make somewhat compromising "arrangements" with the immigration authorities of the Western coast of North America, have prevented the Japanese grievances from flaming into Nippon. However, since the action of These considerations leave the issue as to Japan's position in the comity of nations in a confused state, warranting one in asserting that the world has so far utterly failed to return an authoritative reply as to just where the Japanese stand in the scale of nations, in the absence of which we have only the claims of the Japanese and pro-Japanese, and the attacks and calumnies of Japan's detractors, to furnish a vague, contradictory, and unreliable standard wherewith to gauge the status of present-day |