American prestige in Mexico or adopting the "forward" policy of the financial ring who desire to intervene in Mexico from the basest motives.

It is, of course, nonsense to talk of an "ultimatum" from the Mexican Government, but it is evident that, though Mr. Lind's negotiations proceed with the usual forms of courtesy, Mr. Wilson is not going to receive any encouragement from Mexico, and he will have either to endorse the Huerta system or intervene. If he adopts the first course he will have drawn down upon himself an unnecessary humiliation; if the second, he will have put himself in the hands of the Jingo element in the United States, a really worse humiliation, for it would mean the abandonment of all the principles on which he won office and the adoption of a policy such as he denounced in the case of Mr. Roosevelt. Why President Wilson should have embarked upon a course of action so inimical to the best interests of Mexico and the United States alike it is hard to understand; probably it is due to a pedantic view of what "righteousness" demanded. The recognition of Huerta would really mean the recognition of a Diaz régime which has acquired its position by force. But then Madero ejected Porfirio Diaz by force, and it is impossible to establish or maintain any authority in Mexico at the present time by any means but force, and the President's theories cannot blind him to facts SO remorselessly as to make him unaware of this. Had he accepted Huerta as President, the United States might well have hoped to exercise legitimate influence in Mexican affairs. But he cannot be unaware that the Mexicans regard their powerful neighbors with a not unmerited suspicion, and the attitude he has thought fit to assume has placed him on the "slippery slope" which leads to war. This would be

the very last thing he could wish. It would unite all parties in Mexico against the foreigner, and the struggle would last for years, taxing to the utmost even the resources of the United States.

Such a deplorable result as this might in certain circumstances be necessary, though, even then, it could be only a desperate expedient, but undertaken for such causes as would bring it about now, it would be merely playing into the hands of the very financial interests that the President set out to destroy, truly an instructive instance of the irony of politics. policy entered upon only on the highest ethical grounds is to make its creator merely a tool in the hands of the most corrupt and corrupting forces in American politics. It is sincerely to be hoped that the President will pause before he embarks upon such a

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The most encouraging element in the situation is to be found in the fact that, while the negotiations proceed without either side receding an inch, the Federal troops continue their victorious career in Mexico itself. In a short time President Huerta may have established his authority so strongly that it will be hopeless to try to upset it, and a formula may be arrived at that will enable President Wilson to recede gracefully from a position he ought never to have taken up.

It is significant of the straits to which the United States Government has reduced itself by its blunders that Washington political circles are expressing the hope that "our British cousins will help Uncle Sam in his dilemma." This sudden outburst of affectionate feeling is touching enough whatever the cause may be. We are not likely to stand in the way of any reasonable settlement, and we hope our own representative and those of other friendly Powers may do their

best to induce the United States to accept the accomplished fact. Foreigners of all nations will be the first to feel the disastrous results of hostilities between Mexico and the United States. The view taken by foreign residents is shown by the fact that the British in Mexico are taking the lead in promoting a petition to the Powers of Europe imploring them to use their influence to bring about a unanimous recognition of the Huerta régime.

So if President Wilson resolves to pursue the course he has embarked upon to the bitter end, he will defy all the best foreign opinion and deliberately wreck for a long time all law and order in Mexico itself. He surely cannot be so hopelessly doctrinaire as to hold that Mexico has yet arrived at a stage of development when outsiders have a right to demand that all the formalities of constitutional government should be observed there. Mexico is not yet ripe even for the very im perfect methods of ascertaining the popular will that prevail in Dr. Wilson's own land. A hand that will not hesitate to shoot is the only hand that can hold the reins in Mexico. If this was not clear before it has been made so by recent events, and every day seems to show that in Huerta the kind of President that was wanted has been found. Surely it requires something more than theoretical views as to popular election to plunge Mexico into The Saturday Review.

anarchy again in order to satisfy them.

It is impossible to avoid seeing that President Wilson is, of course unconsciously, playing the game of those in the United States who want to control Mexican politics in order to fill their own pockets. Madero was their nominee, and he was overthrown and murdered by the Diaz party. This party is, it is true, represented by Huerta, but to represent the recognition of Huerta as a condonation of Madero's

murder is pure nonsense. To expect a Mexican revolution, or any revolution, to be carried through without murder is as absurd as to expect a Presidential election in the United States to be accomplished without corruption. Unctuous rectitude is in this case only playing the game of financial villainy, and, oddly enough, the very villainy President Wilson pledged himself to unmask. If he wishes to plunge his own country into a war that would last for years, drive Mexico itself back into anarchy, and play the game of his own political enemies, then he will continue his present policy and try to break down the Huerta régime. On the other side is the alternative of accepting a trifling reverse in policy, and recognizing facts. He will have to adopt one policy or the other. Neither may be pleasant, but there can be no doubt which is recommended by humanity and common sense.

A blue-book issued quite recently is a reminder that even in these comparatively homogeneous islands we have our differences of language. Over a third of the population of Wales is bilingual and some 8 per cent speak nothing but Welsh. Four out of every hundred Scotchmen and fourteen out of every hundred Irishmen are also

adepts in their respective forms of Gaelic. The carnival of these tongues by the side of and in competition with English spells however, on the whole, few political complications. Even in Wales, where the use of the Welsh language is cherished as a symbol of nationality, the problems that its persistence raises are mainly administra

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tive and not political. Perhaps the nearest approach that this kingdom has seen to the language movements that have harassed Continental statesmen is the Gaelic revival in Ireland. A few years ago, before it lost something of its novelty and enterprise, the Gaelic League seemed a really stalwart body. Those who believed that Ireland was in the throes of some such renascence of her national spirit and character as Hungary underwent in the middle of last century pointed to the League and its influence and activities as justifying their faith. they no longer do so, it is not so much that the propaganda has failed as that it has begun to show signs of that creeping paralysis which sooner or later overtakes all Irish movements that are not mainly material. Historically it is no doubt a fact that a language, even when on its death-bed, can be revived, and that, when revived, it becomes the most potent of all agencies in the building up of nationality. But the Irish are not the people for any such feat of endurance as this, and it is already clear that the attempt to preserve and extend Gaelic as a medium of every-day intercourse will fail. A little over a hundred years ago it was spoken up to the gates of Dublin; it has now fallen to the status of a mere fugitive dialect of the barren and backward west; and not even the success of the League in forcing it into the schools and making it a compulsory subject for matriculation in the new university can avert its decay.

"No language, no nation," says a Dutch proverb; and it is true that a common speech spreads its roots far down in the complex psychology of nationhood. We can scarcely imagine what we in England would be like if English a century hence were to die out among us or to linger only in remote seaboard places, and if our

tongues become habituated to the use of another language. We can only be sure that we should not be English, that we should have parted with something that made us a distinctive nationality, and that our minds and manners and ideals and the whole bent of our civilization would be marked with an alien stamp. This more or less is what has happened to the Irish; and a short but sufficient answer to their claim to possess the attributes of a genuine nationality is that within the past hundred years they have voluntarily allowed themselves to become almost wholly Anglicized. With their usual charming habit of never being to blame for anything, they have tried to throw the blame for the decline of their old national language upon the broad British shoulders. But it is impossible to stamp out a language which the people who speak it are determined to keep alive. It was not England that suppressed Gaelic; it was Gaelic that weakened and died under a social and ecclesiastical stigma imposed by the Irish themselves. Undoubtedly its oblivion has done something to disintegrate the spirit of Irish nationality. Undoubtedly also its revival, if it could ever be revived effectually, would mean an Ireland made over. Some of the most interesting examples of national resurrection in modern Europe have had their source in the revival of local dialects. The researches and enthusiasm of a few philologists at the end of the eighteenth century started the movement that culminated in Hungarian independence. The Czechs in Bohemia have only become a solid political power since they discarded German and regained posses. sion of their native tongue. The same impulse of national regeneration, fed from the same springs, has thrilled in turn the Poles and the Finns. The Dutch proverb quoted above ought not

of course to be taken too literally. Switzerland, for instance, is unquestionably and in every sense a nation, although three official languages are allowed in the Parliament at Berne, and on occasion not less than five have been known to crop up in the excitement of debate. But as a rule it remains true that few influences are more subtle, more moulding, more separative in their effects, or harder to shake off, than the influence of language; and a people which has once foregone and then recaptured the use of its own tongue is raised insensibly to a higher pitch of self-consciousness and virility. There may even be hope for the Koreans now that the missionaries, after four hundred years of disuse, are reviving the Korean language.

The Catholic prelates of Austria, in council assembled, once declared that "all differences of language were the consequence of sin and the fall of man," and as such, presumably, could not be put a stop to too soon. Whether that be good theology or not, many Governments have convinced themselves that it is good politics. In Great Britain, however, and throughout the British Empire we have acted on a quite opposite theory. We have made the tender preservation of the tongues of such alien white peoples as we govern one of the principles of our Imperial policy. We have even carried it at times to a point where statesmanship has been submerged in a gush of philological enthusiasm. The privileged position so long enjoyed by Italian in Malta is conspicuously case in point. Italian never had any logical standing in the colony at all. It is not the language of the natives, who speak an incurable vernacular The Outlook.

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akin to Arabic, and it is not the language of the Empire. Nevertheless it was for many years the exclusive language of the law courts, it was optional in the Council, and Sir George Cornewall Lewis made a determined effort to establish it as the sole language of education. Until Mr. Chamberlain brought his vigorous common sense to bear on the question, a British subject in the nominally British colony of Malta was tried in Italian, his evidence was translated into Italian, his lawyer pleaded in Italian, and the verdict for or against him was delivered in Italian. In Canada, strongly against the advice of Lord Durham, and in South Africa we have adopted the same policy of fostering a plurality of tongues on a far larger scale and, of course, with much more excuse. Time may justify it and disclose compensations that will more than offset its palpable drawbacks and inconveniences; and in any case there can be no question of reversing it. But it is worth noting that it is not the policy of any other Imperial Power and that the Boers themselves never practised it. They absorbed the Huguenot refugees in a generation by making them learn the taal and by stamping out the patois of the new settlers with the directness of Russians attacking Finnish. Alone of the leading nations we make no official attempt to propagate or insure the supremacy of our own language in our own dominions; and if the United Kingdom were to act on the suggestion of certain statesmen and convert itself into a sort of administrative and legislative heptarchy, what was once Great Britain might become almost as polyglot as Austria-Hungary.

Sydney Brooks.

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A book for quiet hours and enduring appreciation is "The Hand Petrarch," by T. R. Sullivan. It is a collection of short stories and the first tells of the love which a goldsmith of Bergamo in the 14th century felt for the poet Petrarch. Here we find pure emotion, the joy of craftsmanship, and love of the beautiful expressed in a manner that makes us follow a story of times long past with complete absorption. The other stories touch a variety of people and a variety of places; from a French actress to Roman cabman, from seclusion of a small New England town to a Paris banking house. The stories have this in common: an insight into moods and events which the ordinary observer would pass as insignificant, but which the author understands as the very fabric of true romance. They are cosmopolitan in their breadth, and finished with the most minute care. The reader who skims will find little to hold him in these stories, but one who is willing to approach them in a leisurely way will find a wealth of interest, of feeling, of delicious humor, and of wisdom. Houghton Mifflin Co.

Alaska; a railroad built in spite of tremendous obstacles; the strife of two big-brained men, the one unscrupulous and the other honorable; the love of a young newspaper woman for Murray O'Neil, the "Irish Prince," who wrought his dreams into steel bridges and iron tracks; this is the "stuff" of which Rex Beach makes his new novel "The Iron Trail." Everything is on a large scale here, and from the steamship wreck in the first chapter until the final page the interest is intense. With material which would lend itself

admirably to melodrama, and vital situations enough for half a dozen different stories, Rex Beach always avoids the crudely sensational. In his most exciting moments there is an element of restraint. His descriptions of glaciers and great rivers and storms are vivid and stirring, but the descriptions never get in the way of the narrative, which is rapid and absorbing. The book is a worthy successor to the author's other well-remembered stories of heroic men who conquered great obstacles. Harper and Brothers.

Thomas Nelson Page has named a collection of short, unrelated stories "The Land of the Spirit." It is his belief, stated in the preface, that during the last decade the universal mind has been drawn more forcefully than ever before to things of the spirit, and that the new moral movements have shown men that the kingdom of heaven is here and now. Therefore each of these stories, whether it deals with a party of commercial travelers at an old Southern Hotel, or with the Inn at Bethlehem, emphasizes the value of spiritual over material things. Two of the stories, "The Old Planters," and "The Trick Doctor" are in the vein by which Thomas Nelson Page is most widely known and admired, for they deal with Southern life and people. Others, "The Stranger's Pew," "The Stable of the Inn," and "The Shepherd Who Watched by Night," are mystical and allegorical. The remaining stories, "The Bigot" and "The Outcast," are strong studies of human nature. All are told with the charm and old fashioned gentleness and literary distinction which are characteristic of the author's work. Charles Scribner's Sons.