with which human nature everywhere shrinks from the business in which it is perforce engaged, there is hardly a man or woman in Europe at the present hour who is not in some sense a party to the appalling antics of this 'wilderness.' It was well said the other day by a German prisoner (and better said by a German than by anybody else) to one of his captors, 'A spell has been cast over human nature. We are all mad together.'

The State of which philosophers discourse is essentially a pacific individual, who possesses arms, indeed, but is too much intent on the 'common good' to brandish them in anybody's face; is in fact somewhat ashamed of them as incompatible with its character of general benevolence. It represents the common will embodied to our imagination as a wise and fatherly governor, full of tender solicitude for his charges, attentive to our just demands, a civil personage, somewhat imperious perhaps, but gaining his ends by argument and reasonable entreaty. The war has suddenly revealed the actual states of the world in a very different character. It has shown us that in their relations to one another they are essentially fighting units. As fighting units they negotiate with one another. If a conference of the states of Europe were called to-morrow we should therefore wholly misconceive its character by picturing a group of benevolent frockcoated gentlemen at a round table. We should be nearer the truth if we were to think of a group of wild men armed to the teeth, whose mere proximity to one another, with nothing but the breadth of a table between them, would inevitably cause the shooting to begin. What would happen to a peace conference so constituted is well indicated by the remark which an Irishman once offered as a crowning argument in favor of Home Rule: 'When we get a United

Ireland, and a Parliament of our own, begorra, we'll have a row!'

To this view of the matter the objection may be taken that it fails to discriminate between the different parts played by the various states involved in the complications of European diplomacy, and lays upon all the iniquity of one. There is truth in the objection, and as the partisan of my own country

not of that discredited abstraction called the State' I would be the last to deny it. But the truth contained in the objection only enhances the tragedy tragedy if the word tragedy can be given to iniquity so formless. As the states of the world have hitherto stood related to one another, it is enough that one of them goes mad to drag all the others down with itself into the abyss. If five peaceable states have in their midst a sixth state which chooses to arm itself to the teeth for aggression,a design all the more promising in view of the peaceable intentions of its neighbors,

the five have no resource but to arm themselves in the same way, and when all the six are armed to the teeth together, a general mêlée becomes sooner or later inevitable, no matter what diplomacy may do to keep the peace.

This, you in America are beginning to find out. Your peaceable intentions are no safeguard to you, so long as the other states of the world maintain their character as fighting units. There is nothing analogous to this in the relations of individual men and women who are capable of reasonable intercourse with one another. Among the lowest savages, or among civilized men who have reverted to the savage state, some analogy might perhaps be found; but not in any group whose members are prepared to deal with one another as reasonable beings. Nothing confirms me more strongly in the belief that human nature, instead of being represented at its best in a world of state

relations, is not represented there at all, no, not to the extent of one grain of common sense. And it was in the world of state relations that the present war was born.

What then is to be done? It seems to me that the alternatives before us may be reduced to two which may be briefly described as more government and less government.

1. By 'more government' I refer to that whole class of proposals which aim at controlling the destinies of the nations by some kind of league, federation, or agreement which can enforce peace upon mankind, or at least regulate the occurrence of war, and can otherwise legislate for all matters in which the interests of all humanity' are supposed to be concerned. The states in short are to be brought together into some kind of unitary state.

Of this class of proposals I will only say that its success depends upon one condition. Before the states can effectually form such a corporation, they must divest themselves of their character as fighting units. A federation composed of fighting units cannot do otherwise than fight and the proposal thus becomes a contradiction. It looks as if the proposal were involved in a circle. To divest themselves of their fighting character is the first object for which the states are to come together. And yet unless the states had already dropped their fighting character before they came together, it is doubtful if they would agree upon anything.

The character of the existing states as fighting units is overlooked in every argument in favor of International Federation which has so far come under my notice, and seems to me to destroy entirely the analogy on which these arguments are based. The question is usually raised in this form: since individuals have found a way of adjusting their disputes without fighting, by

means of national law, why should not states do the same by means of international law? But the great difference is forgotten, that the individuals who settle their disputes in court come into court unarmed. If a court of the nations were formed to-morrow, every member composing it, judge, jury, counsel, plaintiff, and defendant, would have a loaded gun in his pocket. Every component state would be in a posture, more or less formidable, for resisting the findings of the court. And the idea that all the other members of the court would automatically combine to shoot down any dangerous member who threatened to draw his weapon, is a pure fiction of the imagination. Almost every question submitted to international jurisdiction would have a tendency to split the court into fairly even halves, just as happens in national party politics. The ordinary relations of majority and minority would indeed be repeated, but with this important. difference that both sections would be armed. And history does not suggest that armed minorities can be stopped from fighting by the fear of armed majorities-especially if the two happen to be nearly equal.

2. By 'less government' I refer to something which it is not easy to formulate into any kind of definite proposal. It is not negative, for it involves the tremendous effort required to turn one's back on the whole idolatrous state-worship, with its rites and mummeries, which has held possession of us for ages; the effort of resolutely refusing to interfere with matters which are beyond human control, but which at the same time our meddlesome habits of mind, encouraged by centuries of false philosophy, are constantly leading us to interfere with. I refer to the gradual abolition of the whole cumbrous machinery of Chancelleries, Foreign Offices, and ministries of all sorts

of things that cannot be ministered to, which in their joint action prevent the natural relations between man and man and produce that intolerable mess of stupidity known as international politics.

My own sympathies, I need hardly say, are with the second alternative, and I imagine it has more sympathizers than have yet made themselves heard. With human nature there is nothing fundamentally wrong, but with state nature there is something fundamentally wrong which can be better reme

died, perhaps, by ending than by mending. At all events, whatever we may be thinking and planning at home, there are millions of men now at the war who will presently come back with the cobwebs shaken from their brains, and who will have something to say in these matters. What will they say? I think they will address themselves to all this array of gold-laced pretense and verbosity; and their words will be summed up in the ejaculation of the young officer, 'Oh, how I wish they would all shut up!'

It used to make me homesick, in our little African clearing, to see the albino woman. She would move about among her brown companions like a flame — and her white body, that flickered in the sun and glimmered in the shade, used to knock at the door of nostalgia. Homesick people always long for a visit, and that albino was so white!

Once, to our neighborhood, where in those days white women did not come, there came a white woman. She did not lodge with us; she lodged with the white officer because she was an officer's wife. We used to wonder if she would call upon us. One of us had a pair of field-glasses, and we used to watch her little figure coming and going about the clearing on the government hill. When one day she was seen to come down into our valley by the zigzag trail, we thought we had a Visit. I cannot tell you how anxious we were, in that little

It seems a hard thing, sometimes, when night closes the doors of all the little trails, that the day has passed without a visitor. It is true of exiles that they have the most unreasonable expectations of the sort, based perhaps upon the migrations of swallows, and not relinquished until the hour of dusk. Yes, then the little trails of the forest are perceived by the mind's eyewhich like a cat's eyes sees them better for the dark to wander away into an infinite distance and a solitude.

Dusk is altogether the most illuminating hour for the exile; he then knows

so exactly where he is; he has a perfectly visual sense of his surroundings. He sees where he is, but how came he to be there? The geography of his circumstance is plain, but not the logic. He who has no other companions than himself suspects this companion, in that hour of dusk, to be a fool. It must be a poor fool, he thinks, who has drifted into such a clearing by such a river!

The forest of the Cameroon is as good a place as any to be homesick; but I will not be saying that the members of my profession and I am a missionary are chronic sufferers. Missionaries are, in the main, gay, and for excellent reasons- some of them pagan reasons, for they are little brothers of Antæus; some of them Christian reasons, for they are of the company of successful fishermen. A fisherman with a good catch can defy even the dusk; his string of silver fish is a lantern to his feet.

No, if there were an altar and a service to placate nostalgia it would not be that fisherman who would most attend that service. The path to that altar would be worn brown by the feet of the trader. I think the trader is lonelier than the missionaries are; he is better versed in solitude. He goes into the forest with a backward look; he comes out of the forest sometimes with a secret and a stricken countenance. More than missionaries do, he does. More often than they, he builds out of his lonely horror and the license of solitude a perverse habitation for his soul. Sometimes and this is very sad - he is afraid. He lingers and lingers on the margin of that green sea of forest.

'The heart,' say the Bulu, 'has gone to hide in the dark.' And this is a Bulu way of saying that the heart is not worn upon the sleeve. Well, upon the sleeve of the white-drill suits that beach-traders wear there is, I will agree, no device of hearts. But those lonely inland traders, those that have traveled ten,

twenty, thirty days from their kind, — what is that they sometimes seem to wear upon the sleeve of their singlets? And who cares where he wears his heart if there is never a white man's eye to fall upon it! In those little bark huts on the trading posts, where young white men pale with the passing hours, there comes to be a careless fashion in wear, whether of hearts or of collars. In the warm dusk of those little houses, where there is an earthen floor, where there are tin trade-boxes as bright as jockeys' jackets, where there are tradecloths printed with violent designs, where there is salt fish and cheap scent and tobacco, where all these desirable things may be had for ivory and rubber, there the trader may wear his heart upon his sleeve without shame. None of those brilliant eyes, set in those dark faces, know a white man's heart when they see it. There in his hut is a monotony of brown bodies quick with vehement gestures; there is a tumult of controversy in a tongue he does not know. The sudden glitter of brass ornament is there and the glitter of brass spears. There are fantastic head-dresses studded with buttons and shells and beads, and scented with the odor of wood-fires. Between those brown bodies and the body of the white man lies the counter. More lies between them than this. There are between them such barriers that the white man is not more lonely when he is alone.

Yet how still it is of an idle day under the thatched leaves of that little house! The sun does its exaggerated violence to the yellow earth of the clearing; the forest hangs its arras over its secret. How far it is, in this place not named on the map, from Manchester! How, when the rain falls, it is other than rainfall on the Clyde! How the pale fruit that hangs high on the ajap tree is not like the apples that ripen in Wishaw!

Do not speak of apples! Nostalgia in

her cruel equipment carries a scented phantom apple.

At night there is about that young trader a trouble of drums that never rest. There is the sharp concerted cry of the dancers. There is the concerted wail for the dead. There is about him all the rhythmic beating of the mysterious life of his neighborhood, tormenting him where he lies under his mosquito net. For this he will rise and walk about, the ember of his pipe drifting back and forth in the dark, and his gramophone, roused by himself, making its limited obedient effort.

There is this about a gramophone: it is a thing that speaks the home tongue. I have seen him sitting under the eaves of his little hut, by his little table spread with a checkered cloth, his gramophone beside him, trying, with its tale of the old grouse gunroom, to divert that lonely meal. Now that I think of it, the gramophone is a kind of hero of my little piece a kind of David with five tunes to do battle with nostalgia. Back in the tent broods Saul, and this poor patient David plays the endless round of five tunes. Until some day there is a javelin in the wall, and a proud black man goes away with a gramophone into the wilderness.

The night sky does more permanent ministry to the homesick, and of all the bright ministers the moon is the most effectual. It is the great reflector of lights; there it comes, swinging up its old path in the sky, and the fires of home are mirrored on its disk. You who read have spread your hands, in your hour of homesickness, to those phantom fires and other hands are always spread. Some of us were sitting on our heels about a little flame in a new clearing; all of us were alien in that clearing; one of us was white. And the black women said to the white woman when the moonlight fell upon all those women faces,

"The moon looks upon the villages and upon the home village. We black people, when we sit in the towns of strangers and the moon shines, we say, "Now by the light of this same moon the people at home dance to the drums!" However far we walk, we look upon the moon and we remember our friends at home.'

Upon another moonlight night, sitting in a forest camp with young black girls for companions, these sang for me a little set of songs the songs, they told me, of the moon:

'Ah, moné zip, alu a danéya! Ah, moné zip!'

This little refrain they sang, clapping their hands ever so lightly, and the meaning of the singing was a warning:

'Ah, little gazelle, the night has deepened! Ah, little gazelle!'

It was a song of the moon, a song for wanderers. And the moon on that remembered night, dragging its net of broken silver cords in among the trees of the forest, caught everywhere the wandering hearts and drew them back on the little rough trails to the home fires. Every night that is a moonlight night there is the casting of that silver net upon far rivers and forests deeper than rivers wherever aliens make a bed of leaves or sleep on a canvas cot.

On such a night, and caught in such a net, I have met the postman. Yes, on just such a night, when the world appeared as it hangs in space, a crystal globe, and when so observed from a little clearing in an African forest, it was seen to be charted for voyagers, and all its little paths ran readily about the globe to that gilt side which is home. On such a night, and upon such a path, I met the postman.

To hang upon a little wicket gate under the moon at the end of a moonfilled clearing in a breach of the forest,

to see the black body of the postman suddenly darken the checkered light