SH

HE took her lovers as a reproach. They made her feel limited. There was a certain magnificence in their contempt for risks and consequences. And they reached heights of knowledge and of delight beyond her experience. Because they gave everything, and she nothing, she had a sense of obligation, and a pitiful impulse to lessen the hurt of disappointment. The compunction would not shake off.

The

Of course she realized that time and another face were sure consolers for nine out of ten of her inconsolables. That discovery had been a shock. Love, in her dreams, was sure and select. saddest thing she had learned of love was that one could love again. Robbing love of its oneness robbed it of its majesty, and made her hope of an affinity mere schoolgirl sentimentalism.

She did not appreciate that to most young folks there comes a restless, unsettled period, when marriage charms because it is novel and unknown; when love is the necessity, rather than the individual beloved; so that the feeling produces the object, instead of the object the feeling. She was herself at this age of conjecture.

Almost unconsciously she considered and analyzed all her suitors, and some who were not. Her lovers disproved themselves in a dozen ways. And always in the first heat of rejection it seemed that their self-love was hurt more than their love. She had an Irish bull to the effect that it was not safe to marry a man until you had refused to marry him.

All this kept her from accepting what the gossips considered "splendid chances," though other girls thought the men she found wanting, strong and manly and lovable and generous.

"I confess," said the man, gravely, "this is not the answer I expected. You let me go on-"

"Yes, I know," she admitted. "I temporized, partly because I hated so to hurt you-"

"That is cruel kindness," he told her, gently.

She looked at him contritely. A little

VOL. XCVII.-No. 577.-19

pause. There had seemed so much to say, but now neither could find words. At last he rose. "Well?" he said. The girl did not move nor look at him. Is there anything else you wished to say?" he questioned.

Yes I hardly know how-" She hesitated.

He sat down, and the constraint grew. Then suddenly she looked up with a nervous laugh. "You always sit and watch me with a sort of reverential regard, while I talk platitudes, as if you dreaded losing a word. I suppose it is in the vain hope I will some day say something."

The man smiled deprecatingly.

"And so," she hurried on, "I have talked of myself till you know me better than I know you. That is the reason I' have kept you waiting so long-hoping I would get acquainted. I was not sure you were not my knight, and, somehow, I had a strong feeling you were, if only I could find it out. I never felt so of any one else. They were all discouragingly impossible. But you have been so interested in me you have forgotten to let me get at you." She stopped for a moment, frowning at the carpet.

It

"I am not a girl of enthusiasms. Indeed, I never loved any one in my life. Yet my aunties call me affectionate. isn't that I am a hypocrite, only that I want to please, to do what people expect; and, the same old story, I hate to hurt any one. So, in the end, they call me fickle, or a flirt. And then I felt that perhaps if I kept exercising my feelings, some day I might care for some That sounds funny, of course, but simply being loved doesn't satisfy me. I have had that all my life. I want to do my share-only-my hero does not come.

one.

"Well-I have been thinking a great deal about it; and I thought-if we saw each other every day, and had—common interests-the flash must come some time —at least, I am willing to-take the risk -if you are!"

And she faced him suddenly, shyly.

He was leaning toward her, his eyes luminous. He put his hand over hers on the chair arm. And the girl held her breath. It was only for a moment. Then he got up abruptly, and stood at the window, his back to her.

"No!" in a new tone, hard and low. "That won't do. If you have not found in me what you want, after all this time, you never will. You are imagining possibilities not in me. Suppose you were tied to me and found it out!"

"I said I would risk it," she repeated. "I never trusted any one as I do you. I know that isn't love," and her brow was troubled, "but it may lead to it. Even if it fails, with you I should be secure and content."

"Dear," he said, "you forget that you said you must do your share of the caring. For a woman especially, a loveless marriage perverts all that is finest and sweetest in her nature. A love that you must accept, and cannot return nor satisfy, is gall and wormwood. I won't have you embittering your life."

"I thought," she said, rather coldly"I thought I was so necessary to your happiness."

than myself-and that is not a mere formula! You must consider nothing but your own feeling in this matter."

"It seemed to me"-there was something plaintive in her tone-"that if you thought of my happiness, and I of yours, things would surely be all right."

Again there was that glow in his eyes. "Dear, how have you learned things like that, if you missed the inspiration of it all?"

She only shook her head. There was silence again. Neither was conscious of the reversal of their usual positions.

She seemed going over it all in her mind once more. At last she sighed: "You don't know how I have tried to make things go your way for both our sakes. There are so many reasons for our marrying-"

The man got up like a caged thing. "Don't say any more! you only make it harder for me to go, and more impossible for me to stay!"

As she watched him inquiringly the trouble in her face changed to wonder. "You always say what I never think to expect," she said, in a baffled way, "and yet" with a sudden warming of her look-"what you do say is always finer than I expected. Oh, it is all wrong! How have we missed each other?”

She gave him her hand, and they stood face to face, until her eyes filled and fell before the gray sorrow of his look. "Good-by, little girl," he said.

"You

peal.

66

'Well, they all protest that," she went on, "but somehow I felt that you really would not forget so easily. The next best thing to satisfying your own life, is to fulfil another's. It might be best of all, under some circumstances. You are strong, with a work in the world. Let me be your influence!"

The surprise and reproach of his look embarrassed her. She mistook its meaning.

"I need not fail you," she protested. "You don't know," with forced lightness, “how really good-natured and obliging I am!"

"Don't! don't!" interrupted the man, with acute pain in his voice. "Indeed I would never have asked you to marry me if I had not thought I could make you happy. If my wife was wretched, could I be content? Besides, I love you better

experience of my life. And, because I know what it means, I cannot help you to miss it. If you are sure"-suddenly catching at a last straw-"sure you do not love me?"

She shook her head sadly, though not decisively. But he saw only sympathy, and went on more steadily:

"Don't reproach yourself. It isn't your fault. And it never harms a man, however much it may hurt, to love a good woman, even in vain. In time the sharp sting will go, of course, but I sha'n't forget you, nor the beautiful things you have meant to me. Besides making me love you, you have taught me a new standard of values, and given a finer significance to my every-day work. And I want to thank you." He spoke very simply.

The girl listened, a change dawning in her face. "Oh," she cried, quickly, "do

Far-Eastern question has so rapidly assumed in the closing years of the nineteenth century can only be adequately appreciated in its bearings on those momentous issues towards which the pressure of modern civilization is driving the human race with irresistible force and daily increasing velocity. It is a favorite commonplace to say that the world is growing very small, but few people, perhaps, realize the deadly earnest which underlies that commonplace. For it is within the limits of this small world of ours that the nations of the earth must live and move and have their being; and in the same proportion as with the grow ing requirements of modern civilization each nation needs more elbow-room for itself, the area within which it can hope to find that elbow-room is being daily and steadily exhausted. The population of the civilized portions of the earth has increased by leaps and bounds-that of the British Isles, for instance, from 16 to 40 millions during the course of the present century, that of the states which now form the German Empire from 24 to 50 millions, that of the United States from 6 to 70 millions--the average duration of life has increased, and the progress of science and the more humane tendency of legislation combine to preserve many lives which from the purely economic point of view are rather a burden than a benefit to the community. At the same time the living wage, the standard of comfort, the demands of luxury, the proportion of unproductive to productive expenditure, have risen no less rapidly in every class of society. To satisfy these growing needs every civilized nation has been driven to work at a pressure unknown to former

developments.

The marvellous discoveries of science have enabled the civilized world to multiply and intensify its powers of production to an almost unlimited extent. But to produce is one thing, and to dispose of what is produced is another. The powers of production of the civilized world have outstripped its powers of consumption, and congestion is only averted by the continuous opening up of new markets and new fields of enterprise in those portions of the earth where the resources of nature and the energies of man still lie dormant. Industry, in the wid est sense of the term, is to-day the breath of the social organism throughout the civilized world, and the cry for more trade-more markets-is as imperative as the cry of the human organism for more air when threatened with suffocation.

In this tremendous competition the Anglo-Saxon race has, by a singular combination of energy and foresight and good fortune, secured a splendid start. Great Britain has built up for herself a world-wide colonial empire; the United States, stretching from ocean to ocean across one of the most favored regions of the earth, overshadows a whole continent. It is not, after all, unnatural that other nations, having lagged behind in the race, should resent the start we have obtained, and that when the moment seems to have arrived for finally opening up the greatest and richest field which the world still holds in reserve, they should be inclined to cry to us: Hands off! You have already more than your fair share. It is our turn now to help ourselves, and to redress the balance in our favor." The growing jealousy with which both branches of the Anglo-Saxon race are

regarded by the leading powers of the European Continent is, at any rate, a fact which has to be reckoned with, and nowhere more than in the Far East, where both Great Britain and the United States have such vast interests at stake. If it was Great Britain who more than fifty years ago first made a breach in the great wall of Chinese self-isolation, America can claim to have played the leading part in rendering Japan amenable to the influences of Western civilization. Shanghai, the greatest emporium of foreign trade in the Far East, bears witness to the shrewdness and enterprise of the English and American pioneers who laid the foundations of "the model settle ment." If the volume of American trade with China and Japan does not bear comparison with that of the British Empire, it is greater than that of any other European country, and it is unquestionably capable of immense development in the future. For the day can no longer be far distant when the piercing of the Isthmus will bring the eastern seaboard of the States into scarcely less close touch with the Far East than the western seaboard, which looks straight across the Pacific to the shores of China and Japan. The shrewdness upon which Americans deservedly pride themselves would therefore have been singularly at fault had they not recognized that the battle which Great Britain is waging for the preservation of China as a great tradal area open to the whole world is one that concerns them almost as nearly as ourselves.

Nor must one underrate the odds against which Britain has to contend. France, thoroughly awakened at last to the value of the colonial empire she once threw away, has devoted no small part of her energies throughout this century, and especially during its last decades, to repairing her blunders of the last century. Germany, whose rapid transformation from an agricultural into an industrial state of the first rank has been a far more momentous event than her political reconstruction, is pressing on in the same course with the feverish haste of a belated traveller. Slowly but steadily, with the resistless momentum of its massive power, the mysterious empire of the Tsar moulds its policy of territorial expansion to new shapes under the influence of its silent development. And moving thus on parallel lines, they combine to curse

the "selfishness" of the Anglo-Saxon race, which bars their progress by the indefeasible right of prior occupancy. They accept, of course, the benefit of the complete equality which Britain grants on the same terms as she herself enjoys to the trade and enterprise of the whole world wherever her influence is paramount, but their only acknowledgment is a vindictive "Sic vos non vobis." They themselves not only erect barrier upon barrier against foreign commerce and industry, but every possession they acquire is immediately turned, as far as human ingenuity can contrive, into a close preserve for the exclusive benefit of their own commerce and industry. The end of the century bids fair to witness the revival, in a more insidious but none the less dangerous shape, of a hostile combination not dissimilar in spirit from the "continental system" which the genius of Napoleon devised at the beginning of the century for the overthrow of British power. This fin de siècle continental system may not be proclaimed at the cannon's mouth, and the smooth-tongued diplomatists of the European chancelleries would doubtless profess to be deeply shocked at the mere suggestion of such a thing. But Count von Caprivi, when he was Chancellor of the German Empire, declared that the days were past when wars could be waged for dynastic interests or for mere political prestige. The wars of the future," he added, " will be industrial wars, waged à coup de tarifs, and if bloodless, noue the less fierce.' We have not had to wait long for the fulfilment of that prophecy. No one who has watched at all closely, of recent years, the political and economic action of Germany, Russia, and France can have failed to note the settled hostility to Great Britain which has been the one constant factor. It was at the expense of British trade that the tariff war between Russia and Germany was brought to a peaceful conclusion in 1894; it was to thwart British policy in central Africa that France and Germany drew together for the first time since 1870, and defeated the main objects of the British convention with the Congo State; and it has been on the basis of the political spoils to Russia and the commercial spoils to Germany that the two empires have worked together of recent years to eliminate British influence at Constantinople.