reader is told simply that he darted to the stable yard, sprang on his horse, and galloped away from Hernshaw Castle, with the face, the eyes, the gestures, the incoherent mutterings of a raving Bedlamite. With what pages and pages of reflections and philosophizings Eliot would have watered. down this powerful scene. Reade describes it all in about two dozen sentences, and the reader knows intuitively everything that is passing in the minds of the three persons concerned. But then Reade's silences are often more eloquent than Eliot's wordiness.

Of the great gallery of portraits in Reade's books, no class has created such discussion as his heroines-Margaret Brandt, Christie Johnstone, Jael Dence, Peg Woffington, and the others. No one has been yet bold enough to deny that they are at least interesting creations; but, says Ouida, who leads the attack, none of them are gentlewomen: "Take, for instance, Zoe Vizard, who is described of good birth and breeding. She speaks and acts like a barmaid; giggles and cries La!" But gentility is something more than merely skin-deep, and so Ouida's major proposition is fallacious. Besides, she has attacked so many other writers of fiction in almost exactly the same terms that her criticisms are not of much weight. Then Mr. W. L. Courtney makes a counter-attack by charging that Reade's heroines are not real living people at all, but only a series of monotonous types of womanhood-namely, the strong natural girl, the sweet simple lovable girl, without much strength of character, and the wicked passionate woman who has moments of grace. This form of criticism has been made to do duty very often. One ingenious gentleman has classified all the characters in Dickens's books, and reduced them to about a dozen distinct types. There is no doubt that the same thing could be done with Scott and Thackeray. And if Mr. Courtney were so wishful he could classify even Shakespeare's heroines under the same headings as he has assigned to Reade's. Kate, Portia, Rosalind, and Olivia would easily come under the classification of the strong natural girl. Ophelia, Desdemona,

Juliet, and Viola would represent the sweet simple loving girl, without much strength except where her love was concerned ; while Lady Macbeth, Lear's two daughters, and Cleopatra are obviously Mr. Courtney's wicked passionate women. There are plenty of sweet and natural women in fiction, from Fielding down to Stevenson, but, as Besant points out, it is Reade who has found the true woman: the

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average woman," with plenty of small faults and plenty of great virtues. Reade neither palliates the one nor unduly magnifies the other. Kate Gaunt is imperious and haughty; Lucy Fountain tells fibs; Christie Johnston mangles the Queen's English; even Peter Brandt's red-haired girl, the most lovable of them all, is not above some small deceits. these shortcomings are nothing as compared with their good qualitiestheir staunchness and loyalty to their own, the depths of devotion and affection in their nature, their mercifulness and forgivingness. No writer in the English language ever showed the beauty of womanhood so truly, tenderly, and sympathetically as Reade has done.

It was the fate of Reade, as it was the fate of Shakespeare and Scott, not to be appreciated at his true worth during his lifetime. When he first came before the reading public with "Peg Woffington," Scott had been dead only twenty years, Dickens and Thackeray had already published the best portion of their work and were the idols of the hour, and George Eliot was getting ready to compete with them as a fiction-monger. The capacity of the public to digest mediocre work is stupendous, but its appreciation of the fruits of genius is limited, and for a time Reade's books did not get all the attention they deserved. However, in spite of Time's handicap they have now placed themselves in the affections of the public on terms of equality with the writings of the older authors, and "The Cloister and the Hearth" is almost as well known and appreciated as "David Copperfield," "Ivanhoe," or "The Newcomes." Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray are kings each in his own particular realm;

THE war with Spain has convinced America that the Nicaragua Canal will have to be constructed with all speedno matter what may be the engineering difficulties and the financial obstacles. And the scramble for China should serve to convince Great Britain that no such canal ought to be constructed in which we have not a very decided share. In defeating Spain the American Union has become a maritime nation, and by annexing Hawaii and protecting the Philippines she will become politically, as she has always been geographically, one of the Powers of the Pacific. Toward the Pacific the balance of the world is now steadily setting. In that vast basin, stretching from the shores of the two Americas to the China Seas and the Indian Ocean, are brought face to face the two great races of mankind-white and yelloweach working out its own destiny. Within that great area Britain, America, Russia, France, and Germany are contending for supremacy in trade, if not for advantage in territory; Japan is establishing her claim to be ranked as a World Power; and China is awaiting a new birth that will revolutionize the West as well as the East. Where seven empires meet is the battle-ground on which will be fought out the great racial struggle of the future, as well as the economic struggle of the present. Where Europe and America impinge on Asia we behold already the beginning of a series of the most interesting problems known to human history. foremost is the commercial one, because everybody says that but for its commercial potentiality China would not be worth a Foreign Office dispatch. And a primal factor in the commercial problem is now the Nicaragua Canal.

The

When she gathered Hawaii into the Federal fold, the American Republic precipitated herself into the Pacific. arena, of which she had hitherto only held the gate on one side. When she sent her fleet to the Philippines she

committed herself to an international policy "at the gateways of the day," which she had previously only dallied with in Samoa, and had tried to commercialize in Japan. Henceforward, for good or evil, the United States takes her place among the nations as one of the Maritime Powers of the Pacific. Does she then abandon the principles of the Monroe doctrine, upon which the late Secretary Blaine founded his scheme of a Pan-American alliance against Europe, and with which President Cleveland sanctified his assault upon our boundary-line in British Guiana? Are the Bulwer-Clayton Treaty and the Monroe doctrine reconcileable, or must the one fall before the other, and both before the advance of the Union into the Pacific? Not necessarily, if we are to interpret the Monroe doctrine in the light of the intention of its author. Eighty years ago James Monroe occupied the Presidential chair, and in 1823 ex-President Thomas Jefferson wrote to him in these terms, in reply to certain "considerations" stated to him by Monroe:

"Do we wish to acquire to our Confederacy any one or more of the Spanish provinces? I candidly confess that I have ever leoked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our sys tem of States. The control which, with Florida Point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and the isthmus bordering on it as well as those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political wellbeing. Yet, as I am sensible that this can never be obtained, even with her own consent, but by war, and as her independence, which is our second interest, and especially her independence of England, can be secured without it, I have no hesitation in abandoning my first wish to future chances and accepting its independence with peace and the friendship of England, rather than its association at the expense of war and her enmity. I could honestly, therefore join in the declaration proposed, that we aim not at the acquisition of any of these possessions, that we will not stand in the way of any amicable arrangement between any of them and the mother country; but that we will oppose with all our means the forci

ble interposition of any other Power, either arbitrary, stipendiary, or under any other form or pretext, and most especially their transfer to any Power by conquest, cession, er acquisition in any war."

Thus far Jefferson, who had just laid it down that:

"Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe; our second, never to suffer Europe to meddle in Cis-Atlantic affairs. America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe and peculiarly her own; she should, therefore, have a system of her own and apart from that of Europe."

And in the following Jefferson was almost prophetic:

"Great Britain is the nation which can do us the most harm of any one, or all on earth; and with her on our side we need rot fear the whole world. With her, then, we should the most sedulously nourish a cordial friendship; and nothing would tend more to knit our affections than to be fighting once more side by side in the same cause not that I would purchase even her amity at the price of taking part in her

wars."

Had Mr Chamberlain, one wonders, been reading the Jefferson correspondence (which Mr. Theodore Cook has rescued from the archives of the Department of State at Washington *) when he made his famous AngloAmerican speech at Birmingham? Jefferson, like Canning, thought that an Anglo-American combination would prevent war, and he favored Canning's proposal of joint opposition to the designs of the Holy Alliance in South America. Our purpose, however, is not to discuss the origin of the Monroe doctrine, but to show what was the intention of the authors of a declaration which ex-President Cleveland tried to convert into a part of international law on the ingenious, though not ingenuous, plea that every just right and claim is portion of international law, that the Monroe doctrine is based on the just rights and claims of the United States, and that, therefore, the Monroe doctrine is a part of international law. The letter of Thomas Jefferson's just quoted was written in October, 1823;

*The Fortnightly Review, September, 1898.

the famous Message of President Monroe was dated the 2d of December, 1823, and a few days later he wrote a long reply to Jefferson's letter, in the course of which he says that,

"We certainly meet in full extent the proposition of Mr. Canning and in the mode to give it the greatest effect. If his Government makes a similar declaration the project will, it may be presumed, be abandoned. By taking the step here it is done in a manner more conciliatory with, and respectful to, Russia and the other Powers than if taken in England, and, as it is thought, with more credit to our Government. Had we moved in the first instance in England, separated as she is in part from those Powers, our union with her being marked, might have produced irritation with them."

Now what can this mean except that what is now called the Monroe doctrine might have been enunciated by Great Britain, with the cordial consent of the United States, but that it was thought more expedient, not to say diplomatic, to enunciate it in a Presidential Message? In point of fact, what Mr. Cleveland and others have sought to construe into an anti-British deliverance was actually an Anglo-American contrivance. It amounted to a public. recognition by the United States of Great Britain as an American Power, and to a declaration of a combined (not a purely United States) policy against all other Powers on the Continents of America. From the spirit of this policy Mr. Blaine was the first to depart when he claimed for the United States exclusive jurisdiction over the Panama canal, should it ever be completed. This claim was promptly and firmly rejected by the British Government, as both traversing our rights under the Bulwer-Clayton Treaty of 1850 and the rights of France under an agreement with the United States of Colombia. The real Monroe doctrine and the Bul

wer-Clayton Treaty stand just as much in the way of an America-for-theAmericans claim to the exclusive control by the United States over a canal across Nicaragua, as they did in the case of the abortive canal across Pana

ma.

The preamble of the Bulwer-Clayton Treaty states that the two countries are

desirous of setting forth and fixing in a convention "their views and intentions with reference to any means of communication by ship canal which may be constructed between the Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, and either or both of the Lakes of Nicaragua or Managua." By the first article, it is agreed that neither contracting party shall ever obtain for itself any exclusive control over any ship canal, or erect or maintain fortifications in its vicinity, or occupy or fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, or any part of Central America, nor will either make use of any protection which either affords or may afford. . . for the purpose of erecting or maintaining any such fortifications, or of occupying, fortifying, or colonizing Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, or any part of Central America nor will take advantage of any intimacy or use any alliance, connection, or influence. that either may possess with any State or Government through whose territory the said canal may pass for the purpose of acquiring or holding, directly or indirectly, for the citizens or subjects of the one, any rights or advantages in regard to commerce or navigation through the said canal which shall not be offered on the same terms to the citizens or subjects of the other." By the fifth article, both Powers engage to protect the canal from the interruption, seizure, or unjust confiscation, and to guarantee its neutrality, conditionally upon the management of the canal not making any unfair discriminations in favor of one or other of the contracting parties. By the eighth article-in order to establish a general principle"-the provisions of the treaty are extended to any practicable canal or railway across any part of the Isthmus, and therefore covered both Tehuantepec and Panama. Now this treaty was concluded twenty-seven years after the Message of President Monroe enunciating the famous "doctrine." The object of the Americans was to effect an understanding that Great Britain should not extend the protectorate ex

ercised over the Mosquito country to other parts of Nicaragua. The object of Great Britain was to prevent the possibility of any such arrangement as that contemplated under the Hise Convention (never ratified), by which the United States were to be granted by the Nicaragua Government the exclusive right to construct and operate a cana! through Nicaragua, to acquire land, build forts, and to exclude the vessels of any Power with which either of the contracting parties (the Republics of the United States and of Nicaragua) might be at war. The Hise Convention was made impossible of repetition by the Bulwer-Clayton Treaty; and the Bulwer-Clayton Treaty amounted to a formal acknowledgment of Great Britain as an American Power, and as exempt from the exclusive policy of the Monroe doctrine. The Bulwer-Clayton Treaty was in existence when General Grant came over to try to raise British capital for the construction of the canal, a design which he had very dearlv at heart. The Bulwer-Clayton Treaty is in existence to-day-and upon adherence to the principle of it, whatever modifications may be permissible in its conditions, we are bound to insist.

With regard to the practical value of a Central American canal, there has been, perhaps, too much disposition to found upon either Suez or Panama. De Lesseps made his reputation at the one isthmus and dug it at the other, and during his career he amply justified his own description of himself, made when launching his Egyptian project: "I am not a financier or a ioan of business." He was certainly neither nor was he an engineer. There was no reason certainly why because Suez had been a success Panama should be one also; but equally there is no reason why because Panama has been one of the world's magnificent failures Nicaragua should be another. For Nicaragua is wanted not such a man as Lesseps was, according to Reran-“ one born to pierce isthmuses, of whom antiquity would have made a myth"-but such a man as Lesseps was not an engineer, a financier, and a