HOW TO ASSURE YOUR LIFE.

A GOOD COMPANY KNOWN BY ITS FRUITS. MR. F. HARCOURT KITCHIN contributes to the National Review for January a very useful article, entitled, "Is Life Assurance a Good Investment?" He answers that it is, but that there are certain ways of doing it, and certain companies which are much the best. The general belief that, as all assurance societies are safe, all are therefore equally good is an erroneous one. Insurance should be carried out on certain principles, and only a certain number of companies satisfy the conditions.

THE PROFIT OF LIFE ASSURANCE.

Firstly, it is necessary to assure in a company which practises the "with profit " principle, or gives bonuses. The extra payment is very small, and the resultant profit out of all proportion larger.

Taking endowment assurance, "with profits," a man of thirty years old would pay an annual premium of about £34

to

assure £1,000 payable at the age of sixty or at previous death. If he lives for the thirty years, and comes into his own at sixty, a good company-one whose compound reversionary bonuses are at the rate of 30s. per cent. per annum-will pay him some 1,500 down. He himself will have paid £1,020. That is to say, he will have got back all the payments which he has made, with compound interest at nearly two and a-half per cent. per annum, and he will have been assured all the time. he had set out to save £34 every year and to invest it for himself he could not possibly have accumulated more than £1,500 in the thirty years, and, if he had died in the meantime, nothing would have come to his heirs except the amount of his savings up to the day of his death.

66 WITHOUT PROFIT."

If

The reason of this is that a great company can get 4 per cent. interest where a private investor cannot get 3 per cent. The man who assures in a company without bonuses only pays £29 a year, and therefore saves £5 a year in premiums. But

On the other hand, he would get no bonuses at all. Consequently, at the end of the term of thirty years, should he live so long, he would receive £1,000 in return for his payments of £870. In other words, he would get back all his premiums, with compound interest upon them, at about one per cent. per annum. There is a difference, therefore, in favour of the "with profit" assurer of one and a half per cent. per annum in interest upon his annual payments. Regarded, then, as an investment, it is far better to pay the higher "with profit" premium, and to share in the earnings of a good company, than merely to purchase a "without profit" policy.

HOW TO SELECT A COMPANY.

Having decided to assure with profit," the investor must select a good company. First of all, says Mr. Kitchin, it must be British. Some of the great American companies cannot be regarded as good, even on the score of security. The company must be judged by the conditions on which it grants policies. The best companies make no conditions at all in nine-tenths of their policies. So long as a man or a woman has no present intention or prospect of going to an unhealthy country, or of engaging in a hazardous occupation, he is granted a "whole-world" policy, free from all restrictions whatever. All he is required to do is to pay his premiums. It was under such whole-world policies as these that many Volunteers and Yeomen fought in South Africa last year, and were not required, in spite of the risk which they ran, to pay any extra premiums. The truth is that the out-ofthe-way chances-the risk of a man committing suicide, or of being hanged, or of suddenly going to Timbuctoo-are so small that a good company ignores them

altogether. A company may also be tested by the rate of profit it returns. A good company will allot to its policy-holders 30s. per cent. per annum upon the amount of their policies, and the same on the amount of all previous bonus additions to the policy. That is to say, to every £100 of assurance policy and bonuses will be added £7 10s. if the policy has existed for the full five years. This rate, says Mr. Kitchin, is the dividing line between good and indifferent companies.

As for insurance without bonuses, there is not the same need for careful selection. Safety is then the chief consideration, and about a score of English and Scottish companies are absolutely safe. In general, life insurance is one of the best and safest as well as the most profitable of investments. It pays much better than Government Securities, and is much safer than Stock Exchange investments. Mr. Kitchin's article is a very clear as well as interesting guide to Life Assurance, and anyone in search of the best method of assuring his life could not do better than consult it.

OLD AGE PENSIONS IN AUSTRALASIA.

DR. FITCHETT in the November issue of the Review of Reviews for Australasia thus describes the position of the movement for the endowment of old age at the Antipodes :

New Zealand led the way in the matter of old age pensions, but New South Wales follows hard on the steps of New Zealand; while Victoria follows a little more timidly. Sir William Lyne's scheme is at least bold in scale. He will give a pension of IOS. a week where New Zealand gives only 7s., and is prepared to reduce the age-line to sixty years. He recognises thrift, too; the possession of a small income is not to be regarded as a disqualification for a pension. The scheme, when in full operation, will cost the colony between £400,000 and £500,000 per annum; and never before in the history of civilisation did a community of a little over 1,000,000 people make so magnificent a provision for its aged members. William Lyne expects to recoup himself part of the cost of the old age pensions by a reduction in the vote for public charities; but this will probably prove a delusion. What really inspires Sir William Lyne with the financial courage to attempt so bold a scheme is the fact that, when the New South Wales tariff is brought up to the general fiscal standard of Australia, there will be a magnificent surplus, which will be paid into the State Treasury. A GREAT SCHEME.

Sir

These old age pension schemes undoubtedly have public opinion on their side. They are wise and humane. They represent, indeed, humanity translated into political terms. Yet, in undertaking them, the colonies are wading in waters of unknown depth. The cost of these schemes outruns all calculation. Mr. Seddon reckoned that his pension scheme would cost £80,000 per annum. Already the expenditure has reached £200,000 per annum. The State pension is legitimate and respectable. It is not the distribution of a charity, but the recognition of a right. So everybody who can establish a claim to a pension hastens to do so. The cost for the other colonies will necessarily be 'greater than that for New Zealand. Mr. Seddon calculated that there were 20,000 persons in New Zealand over sixty-five years of age. In Victoria there are 54,000 persons over that age-line. In New South Wales, with a lower age limit, the number of claimants will be still greater; and, with a higher rate, the expenditure must far outrun that of New Zealand. On the New South Wales scale Great Britain would have to spend something like £12,000,000 sterling per annum in old age pensions.

AN article in the Lady's Realm discussing whether wedding presents are a tax, and deciding that they are, is amusing reading. Besides we have messages for the new century from Archbishop Vaughan, Lady Warwick, and others.

WHAT REMAINS TO BE EXPLORED.

BY SIR HENRY STANLEY.

"FIELDS for Future Explorers" is the title of Sir Henry Stanley's paper in the January Windsor. He opens by sketching the characteristics of the five last decades in Africa. 1850-1880 were years of exploration and discovery; 1881-1890 covered the period of scramble the last decade has been one of internal development :

Regiments of natives have been drilled and uniformed, missions, schools, and churches are flourishing, and every symptom of the slave trade, which was fast devastating the interior even in the eighties, has completely disappeared.

GREAT WORK FOR THE SURVEYOR.

Yet "the continent remains for most practical purposes as unknown as when the Victoria Nyanza and the Congo were undiscovered" :-

The work of the old class of African explorers may be said to come to an end with the last year of the nineteenth century, though there remain a few tasks yet incomplete, which I shall presently mention. The twentieth century is destined to see, probably within the next decade or two, the topographic delineation of a large portion of the continent by geodetic triangulation.

VIRGIN HEIGHTS TO SCALE.

There are other tasks awaiting "young men of means and character" :

Those who are fond of Alpine climbing, and aspire to do something useful and worth doing, might take either of the snowy mountains Ruwenzori, Kenia, Mfumbiro, and thoroughly explore it after the style of Hans Meyer, who took Kilima Mjaro for his subject. There are peaks also in the Elgon cluster north of the Victoria Nyanza over 14,000 feet high, which might well repay systematic investigation.

The African lake-beds and lake-basins offer tempting subjects of inquiry.

DARK PLACES OF THE EARTH.

Passing from the continent for ever associated with his name, the writer treats of other parts of the world. He says:

West and North-West Brazil contain several parts as little known to the European world as the darkest parts of Africa. The debatable territory between Ecuador and South-Eastern Colombia, parts of Cuzco and La Pas in Bolivia, the Peruvian Andes, the upper basin of the Pilcomayo, and an extensive portion of Patagonia, are regions of great promise to geographical investigators, and whence valuable results may be anticipated.

The Great Siberian Railway will afford many a starting-place for explorations to the south, and the fifth part of the Asiatic continent which lies between Lake Baikal and the Himalaya range furnishes a very large field for them. Tibet has long withstood the attempts of travellers to penetrate it for a systematic survey. . . . Perseverance will conquer in the end, and both Tibet and China will have to yield. Arabia and Persia have much to unfold.

The writer also mentions North and South Polar regions, and closes by demanding greater precision and completeness in the work of future explorers. The article is accompanied by a most instructive map showing by degrees of shading the more and the less known portions of the globe. The reader will be struck by the vast extent of blank space still awaiting the explorer, and of the lightly-shaded parts which need much fuller investigation than they have yet received.

THE January Sunday Strand is a very mild number, but a study of "Sunday in Paris," by Mary Spencer Warren, is worth reading, and there are several rather belated Christmas articles.

BLIND RAFTERY:

LAST OF THE IRISH BARDS.

MANY of our readers will be grateful to Lady Gregory for her interesting article on the Irish poet Raftery, which It appears in the January number of the Argosy. supplements the article contributed to the Dome of October, 1899, by Mr. W. B. Yeats, on Raftery's poem, "Dust hath closed Helen's Eye." According to Lady Gregory, Raftery's songs are known wherever Irish is spoken, yet few of them appear to have been printed, and it is only among the people that they are kept in remembrance :

There are many in Galway and in Mayo (writes Lady Gregory) who have got their knowledge of Irish history, forbidden in the schools, from_Raftery's songs, historical, political, and religious; for in Ireland, history, politics, and religion grow on one stem, an eternal trefoil.

Some of the poems have probably been lost altogether; some are written out in copy-books by peasants who had kept them in their memory, but some of these books have been destroyed, and some have been taken to America by emigrants.

His chief historical poem is the "Talk with the Bush" of over a hundred lines. Many of the people can repeat it, or a part of it, and some possess it written out, The bush, a forerunner of the Talking Oak, gives its recollections, which go back to the time of the Firbolgs, the Tuatha de Danaan, the Milesians, the heroic Fenians "who would never put more than one man to fight against one," till at last it comes to " O'Rourke's wife that brought a blow to Ireland," for it was on her account the English were first called in. Then come the crimes of the English.

His love-songs are many, and they sometimes brought good luck, for I am told of a girl "that was not handsome at all, that he made a song about for her civility, and the song got her a husband."

Raftery is said to have spent the last seven years of his life praying and making religious songs, because Death had told him in a vision that he had only seven years to live. . . . His knowledge and his poetic gift are by many supposed to have been given to him by the invisible powers, who grow visible to those who have lost their earthly sight.

There is still a peasant poet here and there making songs in the "sweet Irish tongue" in which Death spoke to Raftery, and I think these will be held in greater honour as the time of awakening goes on. But the nineteenth century has been a time of swift change in many countries, and in looking back on that century in Ireland there seem to have been two great landslips, the breaking of the continuity of the social life of the people by the famine, and the breaking of the continuity of their intellectual life by the shoving out of the language. It seems as if there were no place left now for the wandering verse-maker, and that Raftery may have closed the long procession that had moved on unbroken during so many centuries "on its journey to "the meadow of the dead."

Raftery, it may be added, died on Christmas Eve, 1835; and Lady Gregory, it is interesting to note, seems to have been indebted for much of her information to an old woman in the Gort workhouse and other people who still remember the homeless wanderer who wrote verses and made music on the fiddle. She has also sought out the thatched cottage in which the poet died, and discovered the man who was with him at the last. Raftery's grave is at Killeenin, and a stone is soon to be erected over it.

THE January Strand is one of the best of the lighter magazines. Besides its interesting symposium of Twentieth Century science, separately noticed, it has an illustrated interview with Mr. Henry Woods, R.A., a paper on the recent international balloon contest in Paris, and another on "Peculiar Weddings," all readable enough.

The slump in the cycle trade is the first phenomenon which Mr. Pennell notes. It is not confined to England, but embraces all the cycling world, and especially America, where the League of American Cyclists has fallen in numbers from a hundred thousand to about a third of the number. At the Paris Exhibition this year there was nothing new in cycles, the military cycle being the only conspicuous feature. The free-wheel has made no progress, and Mr. Pennell sticks to his opinion that the free-wheel is a mistake. The decay in cycling Mr. Pennell largely attributes to the ignorance of makers and of the public, who will not realise that cycles must be made to fit their riders as clothes their wearers.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE MOTOR.

It is the motor which has taken the place of the cycle in the minds of manufacturers. Mr. Pennell does not like the motor car, and he gives an amusing account of his experiments with them, which ended in disaster. Up to the present it is the motor-bicycle which is the most practical of motoring contrivances. The motor bicycle has been ignored in England, but on the Continent and in America it is supreme :

I should like to point out that, although the ordinary tricycle is a stable machine, and possesses many advantages over the bicycle, it has virtually disappeared, owing to its still greater disadvantages, and the existence of the motor tricycles one sees about the streets to-day will be even more meteoric. The motor bicycle possesses all the advantages of the ordinary safety; that is lightness, compactness, ease of storage, and, above all, the single track, combined with self-propulsion and speed. The motor tricycle is stable, but it has three tracks, weight, complications, and, greatest of all, the present defect of terrible vibration. The latter alone would be enough to ruin it, even if the weight did not make it just as troublesome as a car, when it breaks down.

THE MOST PRACTICAL TYPE.

At present the great question is whether motor bicycles should be built entirely different from the old safeties, or whether they should merely be safeties fitted with motors. The latter course would be the most convenient, but it is objected that the ordinary safety would not stand the strain. Mr. Pennell thinks that the Werner bicycle is the most practical type :-

To those of us who love the safety, the addition of the motor is but an increased source of pleasure. One may carry more luggage and yet go faster and further, while hills are made level and head winds do not blow. As I have said, the Werner is the only machine I have tried for any distance, and I believe it is the only one which has so far been ridden to any extent. The motor, a one-horse power engine, is placed over the front wheel, and drives it by means of a belt, and front-driven machines are far better than rear. From its position, all parts of the mechanism are visible to the driver, and he also escapes the terrible vibration. A certain amount is felt in the hands, if the bars are gripped tightly, but there is seldom occasion for this. No smell is perceptible from the motor, if it is running properly. The mechanism, which at first sight seems very complicated, is

really very simple, and can be mastered in a few hours, though it requires some time to learn to drive the machine successfully.

Mr. Pennell rode a Werner bicycle from Paris to Lausanne in three days, and ended by climbing the Furka du St. Gothard passes. He concludes by predicting that in a few years everyone will be riding some form of motor; but at the present time all motors are as crude as the bone-shakers of thirty years ago.

MR. HALES ON WAR.

to

APART from the sketch of Lord Salisbury, the chief feature in the Young Man is an interview with Mr. Hales, "What War really means." war correspondent, on At first Mr. Hales's answer to the question. seems to be of the most repellent realism, but round it gradually veers a strange idealism. He begins by saying that war "is one of the most ruthless bitter things on God's earth," and by wishing that those who speak war and write war had actually to experience war. It soon scratches through. the thin varnish of civilisation and lets out the aboriginal savage. Mr. Hales does not accept

the common view that men feel nervous and "cut up" when first going under fire. He saw nothing of it. He was struck by the placid obedience of the soldier. After he has been once hit he becomes nervous, but "his feeling on killing a man is a feeling of fierce joy and exhilaration." "I don't think a man can ever be on a battlefield without wanting to kill somebody." "I don't think Christianity weighs much with any man in war.” This is the savage side of war.

Then the sordid side was touched on :

There was a little poetry about it once, but it is gone, and to-day war is a great commercial undertaking.

The business management of the war, he declares, was pitiful.

If our good, solid, stable business men had been running the commissariat end of our army, there would not have been the muddle there was in South Africa. But we give one of the most gigantic businesses the world has ever known to men who know nothing at all of business and have had no business training-men who have been brought up in the idea that business is contemptible and beneath them. The nation that makes war a business concern will be the nation that will come. to the front in the future, and that is where England ought to shine.

But Australians joined in the war because they desired the nation-making traditions which, Mr. Hales thinks, can only be made by war. He has put this conviction. into rhyme :

A nation is never a nation

Worthy of pride or place,

Till the mothers have sent their first-born To look death on the field in the face.

I OWE an amende to Sir Herbert Maxwell. In the last number of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS I attributed to him, solely upon what seemed to me internal evidence, the authorship of the article "Musings without Method" in. Blackwood's Magazine. Sir Herbert assures me that he is not the author, and that I have done him a great injustice in imputing "Musings without Method" to his pen. I am very glad to know that this is so, for Sir Herbert Maxwell has always written like a courteous gentleman a statement which certainly cannot be made of the author of "Musings without Method."

SOME CORRECTIONS BY THE WAY.

SIR WEMYSS REID, in the Nineteenth Century, makes the astonishing suggestion that President Kruger refused arbitration. He speaks of " those who think that arbitration can be invoked after defeat, even when the defeated belligerent has in the first instance refused it." When did the Boers refuse arbitration? Sir Wemyss Reid would probably serve the Liberal Party much better if he were more careful in looking up his facts than in exhorting the leaders of the Liberal Party to excommunicate with bell, book and candle those who have deemed it their duty to protest against the wholesale house-burning and the systematic policy of devastation which has been carried out by Lord Roberts' orders in South Africa.

The editor of the National Review quotes with much delight passages from an utterance which has appeared under the signature of Mr. Paul Botha. I do not suppose that Mr. Paul Botha wrote it, for I am loth to credit any person bearing that honoured name with so preposterous an assertion as that contained in the following passage :--To Englishmen such as Mr. Labouchere, Dr. Clark, Mr. Stead, and others, who misled the Transvaal and urged it on in its folly before the war, I say that it was inhuman of you to use the Boer as a pawn in your political game--6,000 miles away-and as a peg to hang your European fads on.

This statement that I have encouraged Paul Kruger to go to war is preposterously false. Whatever influence I had I used without stint in the opposite direction. But there is another reason why I doubt the authenticity of this publication. Mr. Paul Botha was a member of the Volksraad of the Orange Free State. We have in the official records of that body a report of his speech delivered before the war, which is absolutely at variance so far from the sentiments which are now fathered upon him. What the real Paul Botha said on June 7th, 1899, at a secret sitting of the Volksraad after the Bloemfontein Conference, was this:

He thought that every member must acknowledge that the proposal of President Kruger is just and equitable, and as this extremely acceptable proposal was refused by the High Commissioner, he must infer from this that the British Government meant nothing else than taking possession of the South African Republic by force of arms. This is all that the result of the Conference taught him, and he found it very sad, because the whole of South Africa would be involved in such a war

A Cathartic for Protestants.

A FREQUENT dose of reading in the Dublin Review would purge many a good Protestant of common prejudices against the Roman obedience. The current issue, for example, of that unimpeachably Catholic magazine not merely endeavours to keep its readers up to date in modern science. It devotes one long article to the late Dr. Martineau's works, and very fairly allows the author to speak for himself. It occupies a great part of another article-that by the Rev. W. H. Kent-with a criticism of the theological movement which took rise from Albrecht Ritschl. Yet another paper-one by R. E. Froude--is set apart to vindicate the freedom of the scientific investigator to use any theory (evolution included) which he may find serviceable in the elucidation of the facts of Nature, leaving questions of theological doctrine apart as under the authority of the Infallible Church.

Probably nine Protestants out of ten would be surprised to find the freedom, fairness, breadth of view, and up-to-dateness of this Romanist periodical.

THE BOERS AS THEY ARE.

BY A GUNNER.

MR. BASIL WILLIAMS, formerly a gunner in the C.I.V.'s, contributes to the Monthly Review a very interesting paper on "Some Boer Characteristics." Mr. Williams writes well, and his evidence adds another valuable contribution to the pyramid of testimony to the character of the Boers. Mr. Williams has seen the Boer in the field, and his testimony is that nearly every single accusation brought against our enemy was false. No one can read his paper without feeling how horribly we have been lied into this war. I was prepared for a good deal of this, but Mr. Williams's certificate as to the zeal of the Boers for personal cleanliness comes to me as somewhat of a surprise. Mr. Williams says :

We found no confirmation in them of the opular opinion about the Boer distaste for water; in fact, they seemed to rush for a wash in a dirty cowpond with as much relish as we. But their most striking characteristic was their genuine piety. Every evening, when their camp fires were lit, they would sing in chorus psalms or hymns in praise of their Maker. Hypocrites the great mass of the Boers certainly are not, any more than our own Puritans were. Hospitable they certainly are, and proud of their country in a way which wins the sympathy of those who are no less proud and willing to fight for theirs.

As to their treatment of prisoners, Mr. Williams bears the same uniform testimony of all those who have been in the field. He says:

I was constantly coming across men who had been prisoners of the Boers at various times; and I think I may say that my informants were altogether fairly representative of all classes of soldiers in the British army. The unanimity in their accounts of the treatment given to them by the Boers was extraordinary, whether they had been going about the country at the heels of De Wet, or imprisoned at Waterval. Not a single prisoner I ever met had a complaint to make about the way in which he had been treated.

66

66

Mr. Williams tells a delightful story about De Wet. The prisoners one time complained about the scantiness of their food, a complaint which they shared with De Wet's own. Well," said De Wet, I know we have been rather pinched lately, but I am going to take a convoy of yours presently, and then we shall have plenty."

As to the abuse of the white flag, Mr. Williams accords with what has been said by Dr. Conan Doyle and all other impartial observers. He says:

As to white flag incidents, there have been instances of the misuse of the flag, but the general impression of those who have been in South Africa is that the instances are not nearly so numerous or so flagrant as they are believed to be in England.

Mr. Williams's evidence is not less clear as to the fact of the house-burning, and as to its grave impolicy. He

says:

But there is no doubt that this method for suppressing disturbance has been largely adopted, and there is always a chance that it may again be resorted to. It seems to me that it is not only often unjust, but almost invariably impolitic. Instead of making the Boers tired of the struggle and eager to get peace, it makes them desperate. They see their wives and children carried away from their homes and their homes ruined, and they feel that there is nothing left worth submitting for.

Altogether, Mr. Gunner Williams has rendered more service to his country by the testimony which he has given as to the characteristics of our brother Boer than any service which he or all the C.I.V.'s together were able to render to the Empire by their excursion to South Africa.

THE TALE OF BRITISH SURRENDERS. THERE has already been a great deal of comment on the repeated surrenders of British forces in South Africa. Hitherto, however, I have not seen any detailed examination of the circumstances which led to so many surrenders. In the National Review for January, Mr. H. W. Wilson supplies the deficiency. Mr. Wilson gives a list of sixteen occasions on which fairly large British forces surrendered to the Boers, eight of these being the result of defeat in a regular battle, and eight representing surprised or ambushed isolated detachments. Up to the end of October the official list gives 292 officers, 7,472 men, and 27 guns captured by the Boers, but the recent disasters must bring the number up to at least 10,000.

THEIR CAUSE.

What is the cause of this? Mr. Wilson deals with the circumstances attending each surrender, and comes to the conclusion that for the surrenders which followed our regular defeats no one can be blamed. As to the ambushes and cutting off of isolated garrisons, that is another story. Mr. Wilson thinks that in many cases no satisfactory explanation is forthcoming. "The most we can say of their defence is that it did not reach a high pitch of resolution." Mr. Wilson, for instance, thinks the Imperial Yeomanry at Lindley might have been expected to hold out longer; and he thinks that the Rhenoster convoy which surrendered immediately on De Wet's demand ought at any rate to have destroyed the stores before doing so. The Derbyshires ought also to have held out if they had been properly entrenched; and the Dewetsdorp garrison ought to have destroyed their guns before surrendering. Mr. Wilson claims that as naval officers are court-martialled for the smallest accident, military commanders ought to be treated in the same way, in justice to themselves as much as to the army and the public.

THE REAL REASONS.

Mr. Wilson apparently can give no general explanation as to all these surrenders. Before the war broke out M. Bloch predicted that in modern war surrenders would be very frequent, not because of heavier losses, but because the losses, owing to the use of magazine rifles, would be inflicted in such a short time as to demoralise the men. A battalion might lose 60 per cent. in two days and continue to fight. But the loss of 10 per cent. in two minutes would probably cause them to run or surrender. This prediction has, of course, been justified by the war. Mr. Wilson also neglects to notice that the relative percentage of officers taken prisoners has been less than half the percentage killed and wounded in battle. Surely the obvious conclusion is that in a great many cases the men only surrendered after losing most of their officers.

The Armies in China Compared.

MR. THOMAS F. MILLARD in Scribner contributes from his personal observation "A Comparison of the Armies in China." He says the various military Powers engaged have watched each other even more closely than they watched the enemy. They have had an unrivalled opportunity in the comparative study of armies. The writer awards the palm to the Japanese. He says:

To the little brown soldiers of the Mikado such honours as. this inglorious war has to bestow must, by common consent, fall. Unpleasantly surprising as it undoubtedly will be to Western. nations, there is no gainsaying this. The Japanese have, of all the nationalities engaged in this business, shown to the best advantage.

But for Japan the Allies would not have good maps. They had continually to apply to the Japanese for intelligence. The Japanese excelled in their medical and ambulance department but most of all in their transport and commissariat service. He especially applauds the Japanese and British use of coolies as camp followers; whose active assistance left the soldiers free to march and fight. The American soldiers, with the best physique, were overweighted with baggage and camp work, and had practically no water supply. Mr. Millard speaks well of the Germans as intelligent and capable. The Russian soldier is rough, hardy, uncouth, almost a barbarian." He was sadly disappointed in the French troops, whose cowardice he suggests, and whose cruelty and wanton destructiveness he openly denounces. The Indian levies which fought under the British flag he does not consider strictly first-class troops.

The Leisure Hour.

"THE Medical Profession for Women" is discussed in an interesting paper by Marie A. Belloc in the January Leisure Hour. The writer estimates that, for women who can face the expenses and the long time of training, the medical profession affords an excellent opening; and not only is this so in India, but there is certainly some opening abroad for British medical women. A lady doctor, half French or half German, and familiar with the Continent, could build up a large practice there. Paris has always favoured women doctors. The writer also insists that a woman finds it far easier to build up a practice, even in this country, than do her male competitors, chiefly owing to there still being so few women doctors, and the novelty alone helping so much to make them known. Other articles discuss "Who was Robin Adair?" and "Weather Forecasting and Its Critics," by Frank T. Bullen, and the eclipse of the sun in May last, viewed from Algiers.