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independent Armenia, and there seems no solution of the Armenian question except Russian annexation. The belief in Russian advance as Armenia's ultimate fate is not, however, inconsistent with a demand for reformed administration on Turkey's part. Under the treaty of Berlin the great powers have a right to demand good government in Armenia. Now that reports of a great massacre, in which from five thousand to ten thousand people were butchered, have been too well authenticated to be denied, the powers have begun to take an interest in the situation. An inquiry has been set on foot by the Sultan, which, of course, will result merely in the whitewashing of everybody concerned. There has been much pressure upon our authorities at Washington in behalf of the Armenians, but England and Russia are the powers which, for diplomatic and practical reasons, can best intervene and proceed to compel the Porte to give the Armenians a decent government. After all, the plan that the civilized world would most readily approve would be an understanding with England by which Russia should send her massed troops across the frontier and proceed to Russianize the whole of Armenia, bringing her Cossacks to teach the Kurds a lesson in fighting. Russia's marvelous success in the administration of her new central Asiatic provinces, and the industrial development of the Caspian country under her recent policy in that direction, have begun to win very favorable comment. As rulers of subject races, the Turks have shown themselves incapable of anything except cruelty and corruption. The English and Russians would seem to be the two modern peoples who can govern Asiatics in such a manner as to improve their condition and insure something like safety, peace and justice.

The War in China.

The Japanese armies, at last accounts, were advancing step by step toward Pekin. China's demoralization seemed well nigh complete. The outside world is only beginning to understand somewhat concerning the lack of anything like national integration in the Chinese empire. As Mr. Julian Ralph, who is now sending letters from China, has explained it, the Chinese are a people, but not a nation. He remarks that their present attitude is something like that of a great quantity of leaden shot, scattering in all directions when the bag which contained them bursts. The other provinces have not the faintest intention, apparently, of coming to the support of those immediately involved in the war. A change of dynasty, as a result of the Japanese invasion, seems not improbable. The Japanese have declared their willingness to make terms when China shall directly appeal to Japan, but not sooner. Meanwhile, the Japanese, as a result of this military venture, are to gain at a stroke what they have for so long been anxiously pleading-namely, the revision of the galling treaties which have limited their fiscal and judiciary independence. The day of European and American consular courts in Japan will soon be numbered; and the Japanese see before them clearly the time when they will be at liberty to raise or lower

their tariffs on foreign goods in accordance with their own views of sound policy.

the Year.

The close of the year now near at hand The Drift of naturally suggests the question as to the drift and tendency of affairs during the twelve months. Is the drift backward or forward, toward peace or war, toward barbarism or civilization, progress or retrogression? The answer will vary according to our moods and sympathies. But the general tendency seems to be forward, although many of the agencies and instruments whereby peace, progress, and civilization have been attained are being used up in the movement. Parties and churches and empires are like the baggage wagons of an army in progress. They wear out and break down and disappear and are forgotten, but the army arrives. So it is with the human race. The Chinese Empire, with all its faults, has for millenniums done a civilizing work among a third of the human race. It is crumbling beneath the blows of the Japanese. The Russian Czar, who for the last twelve years has kept the peace of Europe, is dead. The American Democratic party, the hope of the free traders, was overwhelmed at the November elections by an electoral avalanche of disaster. In England the Liberal party is marching to the abyss. And yet who is there who does not feel that the securities for civilization in the East, peace in Europe, political progress in America, aud reform in England, have been strengthened rather than weakened in the course of the year?

The Prince of Wales and Peace.

The first of all interests is peace, and the disappearance of the stalwart form of "The Great Emperor of Peace" оссаsioned for a moment a thrill of awe through the Continent. But hope springs eternal in the human breast, and the manifest rapprochement between England and Russia that followed the death of Alexander III has revived the confidence of all those who know that the entente between London and St. Petersburg is the sine quâ non of tranquillity in Asia. The public both in Russia and in England has noted with satisfaction, even with joy, the close intimacy between the young Czar and his uncle the Prince of Wales. For three long and trying weeks-weeks which count for more than as many years-the Czar and the Prince stood always side by side before the world in public, and in private they were not less intimate. It is not too much to say that since the death of the Czar the Prince of Wales has had his first great opportunity of exerting the imperial influence that belongs to his exalted position, free from the trammels of the court or the embarrassing anxieties of cabinet ministers. By universal consent the Prince has risen to the height of his great opportunity, and without meddling in politics or playing at diplomacy has done more to place the relations between the two Empires on a foundation of personal confidence and affection than could have been accomplished by all their statesmen and all their ambassadors.

If princes are being utilized to do the work The Peers and of the peace society, the English peers are Reform. being employed in the work of social reform. In old times it used to be said that one of the favorite expedients of the aristocracy was to engage the attention of the people in a foreign war in order to stave off domestic reform. To-day the peers all unknowingly have taken exactly the opposite course. By their attitude of uncompromising opposition to the concession of Home Rule to Ireland they have compelled their own party to concentrate attention upon projects of social reform. By waging war to the death with Archbishop Walsh, they have given over the citadel to Mr. Chamberlain. To strengthen their ranks against a political change in Ireland they are acquiescing in a social revolution at their own doors. It is interesting and full of suggestive significance. Upon all political and constitutional changes opposed by the Tory party-upon Home Rule, upon Disestablishment, upon Prohibition-they have laid a veto. They are "Thou shalt not" incarnate. But as a party must do something, the Conservatives are driven to adopt a programme of social reform which they would have opposed tooth and nail if it had been brought forward by the Liberals.

Mr. Chamberlain as Tory Bellwether.

And Mr. Chamberlain is the zealous bellwether of the flock. Liberals lamented when Mr. Chamberlain forsook the party with which he had been accustomed to act. It seemed like the extinction of a personal force which had been confidently counted upon in the interest of progress and reform. But wisdom is justified of her children, and every one can now see that Mr. Chamberlain has been, and is, and is likely to be, more potent in the Tory camp than he ever could have been among the Liberals. There are plenty of reformers of his type in the Liberal ranks. The Tories have none but Mr. Chamberlain. He is a kind of solitary Radical missionary permeating the Conservative heathen with doctrines of social reform. From the point of view of such men as the Earl of Wemyss and all hidebound Conservatives of the old school, Mr. Chamberlain, far more than Lord Rosebery or Mr. Labouchere, is the enemy to be feared and hated. Mr. Chamberlain believes that he won the General Election of 1885 by his unauthorized programme. In the counties, as Mr. Labouchere put it in his gay and picturesque fashion, Joseph saved us. His three acres and a cow simply romped in." Mr. Chamberlain expects to render the same service for the Conservative Party in 1895 that he rendered to the Liberals ten years ago. Last month he repeated in Lancashire the appeal which he had previously addressed to Birmingham. Here, he said, is a Policy of Construction :

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1. Municipal monopoly of public houses.

2. State loans to enable workmen to buy their own houses.

3. Old Age Pensions.

4. Tribunals for Industri 1 Art itration.

5. A Veto on Pauper Immigration.

6. A better Employers' Liability bill than that of 1894.

This, says Mr. Chamberlain, is a practical programme, a serious programme, which will meet with little opposition and which can be passed within a reasonable compass of time. Above all he reminds us it can be passed through the Lords.

Lord Salisbury at Edinburgh and the Duke The Tories Adopt the of Devonshire at Barnstaple, have given Programme. Mr. Chamberlain's unauthorized programme their solemn and official benediction. Mr. Chamberlain declares :

I am perfectly satisfied with their statements on the subject of my programme, and as a Conservative government gave free education and allotments legislation, I have confidence that they will take up and carry to a successful issue the Unionist programme of social reform which is now before the country, many of the items of which have already been advocated by Conservative members, and which has received the support of some of the most influential Conservative organizations. The strength of Mr. Chamberlain's position is the fact that he may claim truly enough that he has the House of Lords in his pocket. But the question whether any party in the state can afford to allow its opponent to carry a branch of the legislature about with it in its pocket is one which admits of only one

answer.

An Inevitable

The Liberals, in face of the Tory monopoly of the upper chamber, must make a stand Conflict. or consent to their own virtual extinction. If the Conservatives fail to see this, let them ask what they would think of the monarchy, if the Prince of Wales when he came to the throne were to pose as a thorough-going Radical and to refuse to give the royal assent to any measure passed by the Conservatives. The Tories themselves would declare that in such a case the monarchy would not be worth six months' purchase. Neither party can afford to allow an integral part of the legislative machine to pass solidly and permanently into the hands of its opponents without acquiescing at the same time in its own annihilation as an instrument of government. Hence the question of the peers is for the Liberals a question of life and death. That, and that alone, explains why, with infinite reluctance and without any clear and definite plan, Lord Rosebery has been compelled to challenge the peers to a conflict, the immediate result of which is unfortunately a foregone conclusion.

The Justification of Lord Rosebery.

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Lord Rosebery could not help himself. He was compelled to offer battle, and to do so in such fashion as to render it possible for him to carry his party with him. All that his promised resolution proposes to do is to raise the issue, whether or not the nation desires to be governed by the will of its elected representatives or by the will of four hundred peers? He emphasizes his opinion in favor of a second chamber, because, if he did not, the vehemence of his Radical supporters would give the country cause to believe the resolution was equivalent to a declaration in favor of a single chamber.

Lord Rosebery, like a prudent man, tries to take one step at a time. He is in command of a mixed host of "menders" and "enders." To be able to fight at all, he must offer menders and enders some common formula around which they can rally. This he has discovered in his declaration that the House of Commons must be the paramount partner. As to the second step,-whether it must be in the direction of ending or mending,-that must wait until the first has been taken. And nothing seems to be more certain than that the first step will not be taken until the next general election but one.

The

The result of Forfarshire by-election, Warning where a Unionist carried what had long from Forfar. been regarded as one of the safest Radical seats in Scotland, has tended to increase the general feeling among the Liberals that they have no chance worth speaking of at the general election. It is true that the cards were packed in favor of the Unionist. The late Liberal member had disgusted his constituents by leaving them after he had secured for himself legal promotion and before he had secured for his ploughmen electors the statutory halfholiday which they covet much more than Home Rule. The Liberal candidate was a stockbroker from London. The Unionist candidate was the representative of Lord Dalhousie, commanding all the

ive programme and secured the defeat of the Liberal interloper by 286 votes, where Sir John Rigby had previously been elected by a majority of 866. Hence deep dismay and grave searchings of heart in the Liberal ranks.

But the Forfarshire ploughman is not the Mr. Grand Elector of the British Empire; and Schnadhorst. if Forfarshire stood alone there would be no need for Liberal despondency. But much more serious than the loss of half a dozen by-elections has been the loss of Mr. Schnadhorst. Mr. Schnadhorst for a dozen years and more has been the Carnot,

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MR. SCHNADHORST.

who organized victory for the Liberals. He was the tried and trusted chief of the staff at the party headquarters, a post for which he had every qualification but one. That defect, not noticed when he was in the saddle, tells heavily against the party to-day. He trained no successor. He had assistants, and another man now sits in his sanctum; but there is no Schnadhorst II. And therein the Liberals suffer a grievous injury which will cost them many seats at the general election.

Irish Disunion the Hope of Unionism.

The danger of a crushing Liberal defeat may lead the Irish factions to drop their internecine feuds. It would be well if Mr. Healy and Mr. Redmond and Mr. Justin McCarthy could be shut up like a jury, without fire, food or drink until they arrived at an agreement by which they could spike the Unionists' chief argument. That is based upon the rooted conviction that the Irish are a race afflicted, as by some strange curse, with an utter lack of that political common sense which finds expression in the give and take of sensible compromise, without which self-government is impossible. At present there is but small sign of any movement in this direction. The Parnellites, whose object it seems to be to borrow, even from the

charnel-house of death, poison with which to envenom the weapons of political controversy, quote the Duke of Devonshire's speech at Barnstaple as a justifica ion for prolonging the present anarchy of faction among Irish patriots. The Duke said:

We can offer to the people of Ireland their full share of all those reforms, political or social, which we think a wider knowledge of the wants of the people and a fuller sympathy have brought into our view.

This, it is argued, may mean that Ireland will receive local self-government from the hands of the Unionists. If the Irish prefer a Local Government bill to Home Rule, no doubt this may come true. But do they? That is for the Parnellites to decide.

London School Board Election.

The London school board election contest was prosecuted with unusual acrimony on both sides. Churchmen maligned Nonconformists as Atheists, and Nonconformists discredited a good cause by making party capital out of the private devotions of Mr. Athelstan Riley, whom they regarded as a Romanist in disguise. The odium theologicum, however, usually bears these poisonous fruits. The real and the only important issue from a practical point of view was not theological but educational. The denominationalists had starved the board schools lest they should compete at an advantage with the schools of the church. That policy of the "stingy stepmother was the thing against which the indignation of the citizens was directed. The result was unexpectedly favorable to the opponents of the church party. The Progressives polled a clear plurality of 135,000 votes, representing a majority of some 30,000 voters. The East and South of London gave a heavy majority for the Progressives. The strength of the Moderates lay in the wealthy voters of the City, Westminster, Chelsea and Kensington. So decisive a victory at the polls has filled the Liberals with delight and the denominationalists with dismay.

The Cumulative Vote.

The moral effect of this emphatic deliverance by the citizens was partially obscured by the fact that, owing to the fitful operation of the cumulative vote, a party with a majority of about 130,000 voters in the constituencies finds itself in a minority of three on the board. The result is due to the collapse of the Labor and Social Democratic parties. When the Progressives nominated their candidates they only nominated twenty-eightsufficient to give them a majority of one if every candidate was elected, relying upon the return of a sufficient number of Labor or Socialist candidates to make up for any casualties among the Progressives. But as often happens in a severe contest, the forces of gravitation proved irresistible. Citizens who might in ordinary times have voted for independent candidates, rallied to the regular party ticket when they got interested in the main issue. As the result, the independent candidates were "left" everywhere. The cumulative vote, which was invented to give representation to minorities, left the Labor, Socialist, and Catholic groups without a solitary representative

on the board. This system, advocated as an ideal plan for apportioning seats in proportion to the number of the voters, worked out in practice so as to give a majority of the seats to the minority of the voters.

Other

The school-board elections in London School-Board were immediately preceded by similar Elections. elections in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Rochdale and Salford, and followed by others in Bradford, Gateshead and Sheffield. The results call for little remark, the status quo being left on the whole unchanged. The attempt to run Labor candidates met with very slight success. The Labor

party won two seats from the church party at Rochdale and one from the Progressives at Salford. None of their candidates were elected at Liverpool, Manchester or Birmingham. The most notable feature in these elections was the return of Mr. Anstell, the representative of the Teachers' Association, at the head of the poll at Birmingham. Mr. Anstell polled 146,000 votes out of a total of 390,508, polling actually more than the total, 121,488, which returned the whole Liberal eight! The next highest poll was 33,329. If the Birmingham teachers had run a teachers' ticket and distributed Mr. Anstell's votes they might have had a majority on the board. In West Lambeth Mr Macnamara, the teachers' candidate, polled the heaviest vote cast in London-viz., 48,255. The advent of the teachers as a force in British school-board politics is a new and somewhat significant feature of these elections.

The Teacher

in Politics.

The teachers if they please can without much difficulty elect the English school boards. They have the confidence of the parents. They are closer to the electors than any politicians, and if they choose to follow Mr. Macnamara and Mr. Anstell, they can oust both Progressives and denominationalists, and run the elementary schools to suit themselves. Mr. Bryce adverted to another phase of this question when speaking at Clerkenwell on education for citizenship:

In view of the ever-increasing duties of citizens in the exercise of their several franchises, the function of the teachers became one of the most important in the State. There had been countries where almost everything depended upon the teachers. In Bulgaria, after the Turks were driven out, this class became the most important in the community. The teachers became the ministers and administrators of the country and had enjoyed ever since a large share in its government. Again, in Germany in her dark period between the great peace in 1815 and the revolutionary outbreaks of 848, it was by the German professors that the torch of freedom was kept alive and the dream of a revived Germany cherished. In this country the elementary teachers would have much to do in molding the future citizens of the country. It would be their duty to cultivate these principal qualities in their pupils: First, intelligence to appreciate the real issues before them; secondly, independence of all sinister influences, whether of employer, or of political organization, or even of spiritual adviser. Above all, the voter should take care that the controller of the organization should not "boss" it, as the Americans said. The third quality was interest and earnestness.

THE NEW REICHSTAG BUILDING.

Of one thing we may be quite sure. The policy of the "stingy stepmother" will never command the enthusiasm of the teachers.

Cecil Rhodes

The most important event in the Britand South ish colonial world has been the arrival African Affairs. of Mr. Cecil Rhodes with his staff in London, and the subsequent publication of the agreement between the South African Chartered Company and the British Government, by which the administration of the British sphere of influence up to Tanganyika is made over to the company. This is equivalent to the "Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things." Mr. Rhodes will no longer subsidize the British Empire by defraying the cost of Nyassaland. That will pass into Mr. Johnston's hands and be administered at the cost of the Empire. But he will undertake to answer for order in all the Hinterland up to the southern shore of Tanganyika. His telegraph to Cairo is being pushed northward, and all seems to be going well with this most prosperous of Africanders. If the lady dentist in San Francisco who has introduced the fashion of setting diamonds in the front teeth of lovely women should inaugurate a new and popular craze, Mr. Rhodes would probably feel strong enough to undertake a mission to the Mahdi. For Mr. Rhodes keeps the strong box of the Golconda, wherein are most of the diamonds of the world, and not even a 25 per cent. duty can shut the gems of De Beers from the United States.

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will find, as England did in Afghanistan, that it is easier to take a wolf by the ears than it is to make a sou by the tanning of his hide. The Hovas have General Fever to decimate the army of their invaders, and civilization has not yet made a road for the powdercart to the Malagasy capital. It is interesting to note that the French profess to dread the ambition of "that daring, ardent and venturesome man of genius," Mr. Rhodes. This is almost the first case since the days of Clive and of Warren Hastings of a British colonial statesman big enough to cast a shadow that can be felt in Paris. Mr. Rhodes is ambitious enough, no doubt, but he has hitherto manifested no anxiety to interfere with the French in Madagascar.

The opening of the session of the Reichstag, together with the dedication of its new parliament house in Berlin, was an occasion upon which the interest that might naturally have

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