The Review of Reviews

THE NOTE OF NORWEGIAN LITERATURE.

Mr. Björnstjerne Björnson concludes his appreciative sketch of contemporary Norwegian authors, dealing with Jonas Lie, Alexander Kjelland, Arne Garborg, Mrs. Amalie Skram, and Knut Hamsun. Mr. Björnson regards as the distinctive glory of Norwegian literature that it is a literature with a purpose. He says:

By its works Norwegian literature acknowledges that it shall take a part, and the greater part, of the common responsibility; that a book which does not clear away or build up in such a way that it tends to increase our power, enhance our courage, and make life easier to us, is a poor book, however perfect its art may be. Simply to get an opportunity to say this to the world, I have undertaken to write this sketch, the only one of the kind I have ever written or shall write.

This distinguishing mark of wholesome responsibility, characteristic of Norwegian literature as a whole (the exceptions are always set aright by general consent), is partly due, I believe, to the fact that it is the conscience of a plain democratic people, and partly to the circumstance that most of the poets were children or grandchildren of peasants.

A HINT FOR THE C. O. 8.

Mrs. Josephine S. Lowell, writing on the "True Aim of Charity Organisation Societies," says:—

The aim of a Charity Organisation Society should be to get people to do far more in every way for those in distress than they have ever thought of doing. It should teach them that people ought to give more time, thought, and money than they are in the habit of giving. Every different case of distress can be dealt with in the same spirit, but it is not necessary to go into details. The principles of the Charity Organisation Societies can be summed up in two texts: "Man shall not live by bread alone," which applies to the poor as much as to the rich; and "What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" AMERICA'S DUTY TO ARMENIA.

The Armenian preacher Mr. Mangasarian, of Chicago, publishes an article entitled "Armenia's Impending Doom: Our Duty." Mr. Mangasarian says:

In my humble opinion, it is the duty of America and Europe to intervene for good. The doctrine of non-interference is dangerous and unworthy of our religion and civilisation. When I think how some of our best men and women maintain a studied silence and turn a deaf ear to the cry of agony from the cities and villages of Mount Ararat, a terrible sadness comes over me. My hand shakes so that I cannot write; the tears fall hot upon the page before me; I feel a stifling sensation in my breast, something like a lump rises to my throat, I shudder and gasp for breath! If we fail to save the starving Armenians, they will perish. But that is not such a dreadful thing after all. Something worse than that will happen to us; we will die a moral death.

And he quotes Mr. William Watson's sonnet, declares that he is the Laureate of humanity, and remarks:

In what other country has there been raised a voice so pure and sonorous, so mighty and moral? The Armenians are hopelessly doomed unless the English-speaking people hasten to their assistance.

THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN IN TURKEY.

Miss M. Patrick, of the American College for Girls at Constantinople, describes how the matter stands in Turkey to-day. In this field, as in many others, the American missionaries have done excellent work :

The Women's Board of the United States has established throughout Asia Minor an extensive system of schools which has done much to popularise education for girls. The first of these was founded in Constantinople in 1840, and at present there are sixteen high schools under American supervision in different parts of Asia Minor. The teachers in many of them are from various women's colleges in the United States, the course of study is comprehensive, and the methods of teaching are modern. Consequently, their influence is strong and widely felt. None of them is a free school, but a limited number of scholarships is provided in all for those who wish to educate themselves as teachers. The only cosmopolitan school among them is the American College for Girls in Constantinople, although there are others in which three or four nationalities are represented.

A NOVEL REMEDY FOR DROUGHTS.

Mr. E. V. Smalley, writing on "Our Sub-Arid Belt," in which agriculture is practically impossible without irrigation, mentions an ingenious method that has been invented by a South Dakota farmer for the purpose of combatting the excessive dryness which renders whole districts unfit for settlement::

His idea is to make better use of the moisture that falls in showers by storing it, so far as possible, just below the roots of the growing crops and preventing its too rapid evaporation. To this end he has invented a sort of cultivator that packs the ground a few inches below the surface so that a considerable amount of water will be held above the subsoil. Then, acting on the known fact that capillary attraction and consequent evaporation take place much more rapidly when the surface soil is firm and baked by the heat than when it is loose, he stirs up the surface by repeated working with another sort of cultivator. This second process is easy enough with corn- and root-crops, but he proposes to employ it with wheat, sowing the grain in rows and tilling the fields by a machine specially designed for this purpose. He illustrates his theory of capillary attraction and evaporation in dense surface soil by showing how much more rapidly a fine-grained sponge will suck up water than will a coarse-grained one, and how much more rapidly it will give out water when the two sponges are saturated and placed on a board in the sun to dry.

THE POLICY OF TERRITORIAL EXTENSION.

Mr. W. G. Sumner exposes with uncompromising vigour the inconsistency of those Jingo Protectionists who are perpetually declaring that to promote Free Trade with Canada would be ruinous to American industry, and then are threatening to conquer Canada. which would at once establish Free Trade between all parts of Canada and the country which had annexed it. Colonisation, he points out, is a burden, and under a Free Trade system an unnecessary burden :

Any extension will not make us more secure where we are, but will force us to take new measures to secure our new acquisitions. The preservation of acquisitions will force us to reorganise our internal resources, so as to make it possible to prepare them in advance and to mobilise them with promptitude. This will lessen liberty and require discipline. It will increase taxation and all the pressure of government. It will divert the national energy from the provision of self-maintenance and comfort for the people, and will necessitate stronger and more elaborate governmental machinery. All this will be disastrous to republican institutions and to democracy. Moreover, all extension puts a new strain on the internal cohesion of the pre-existing mass, threatening a new cleavage within. If we had never taken Texas and Northern Mexico we should never have had secession. The sum of the matter is that colonisation and territorial extension are burdens, not gains.

OTHER ARTICLES.

Those who are interested in the agitation for securing the adoption of the Referendum in this country may be interested in the article on "The Direct Legislation Movement and Its Leaders," which is written by Mr. E. Pomeroy. Mr. W. P. St. John, President of the Mercantile Bank of New York, lays down what he thinks will be the best platform for the American Independents at the next Presidential election. It consists of four

planks: (1) Free coinage of silver; (2) The restoration of the mercantile tariff; (3) The adoption of the initiative of the Referendum; and (4) We condemn Clevelandism utterly. There is another article in favour of Bimetallism by A. J. Utley. Mr. H. W. Dresser has a somewhat disappointing paper on the Mental Cure and its relation to mankind, and the editor discourses on Whittier as a prophet of freedom.

THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

THE North American Review for June is a capital number. I quote at some length from the more important articles elsewhere.

ITALIAN IMMIGRATION TO AMERICA.

Dr. J. H. Senner, U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, has a very interesting article on "Italian Immigration," which dissipates ruthlessly the scare recently got up by the American press as to the flooding of the country by Italian immigrants. In the first four months of this year, only 27,000 Italians landed in New York. Of these nearly 14,000 had either been in the United States before, or were joining families already settled in the country. In the previous two and a half years the number of outgoing Italians had exceeded the number of new arrivals by some 25,000. Dr. Senner says that the Italians who come over young are soon Americanised. In New York all the Italian priests in their religious services, their Sunday-schools, and even in their confessionals are obliged to use the English language if they hope to be understood at all by the second generation. Dr. Senner thinks that it would be well to impose an educational test for male immigrants over sixteen years of age, but this is chiefly because he thinks that illiteracy is invariably coupled with a low standard of living which leads to a low standard of wages. Dr. Senner's conclusion as to the results of his experience as Immigrant Commissioner is thus stated::

I have come to the conclusion that the final solution of the "immigration problem" is not to be found in the application to immigrants of any additional test of eligibility, but in a wise distribution of the desirable immigrants among the localities where they are especially needed and their employment in the kinds of work for which they are peculiarly fitted. A National Land and Labour Clearing House, to be established in connection with the great immigrant station at Ellis Island, with branches at the other stations, would, in my opinion, if properly conducted, prevent all possible dangers from immigration.

WHAT THE A. P. A." HAS DONE.

Mr. Traynor, President of the American Protective Association, now in the tenth year of its existence, blows its trumpet lustily in an article entitled "The Policy and Power of the A. P. A." According to Mr. Traynor, there never was such an association. It is the strongest and purest political force that the Western world has ever known. It has a membership of nearly 2,500,000 persons, who influence at least 4,000,000 votes. This is a statement which had better be told to the

marines than printed in a responsible and a respectable review like the North American. Although the “A. P. A.” commands 4,000,000 votes, they only succeeded in pledging 100 members of the present House of Representatives to support the platform of the Order as a whole or in part, and Mr. Traynor has the honesty to admit that many of these did not lose any time in repudiating their principles as soon as they were elected. "With the exception of about a score, the representatives of the A. P. A. in Congress are among the weakest and the least reliable members of the Order." Mr. Traynor threatens that, if the two great political parties refuse publicly to recognise and endorse the essential principles of the "A. P. A.," the latter will start an independent presidential candidate. Let us hope that they will, and then we shall see how many of these 4,000,000 votes they can really control. Yet this mighty association, which declares that it is opposed chiefly by the illiterate elements of the nation, is so weak that to avoid ruin it has to take shelter in secrecy! Mr. Traynor says:

Nearly every member of the A. P. A. who made himself prominent in the movement retired absolutely ruined in politics and purse, and while hundreds of thousands sympathised and accorded to the Order their passive support, only a small percentage dared brave the storm of disaster that inevitably followed membership in the Order. These conditions led to the enforcement of absolute secrecy both as to membership and place of meeting, but to no purpose.

It is singular, to say the least, that an association which is strong enough to run a presidential candidate is not capable of holding its own against the boycott of a pack of illiterate Irishmen.

WHY MURDER THRIVES IN THE UNITED STATES.

The Hon. I. C. Parker, Judge of the United States District Court of Arkansas, writes a very startling paper "How to Arrest the Increase of Homicides in America." It is a more damaging indictment of the way in which Republican institutions are worked across the Atlantic than anything that has been published of late years. Judge Parker maintains that in the States murder is increasing, and will continue to increase until "the man of crime," as he calls it, dominates American society, unless something is done to check this ghastly growth. During the last six years there has been an average of twenty homicides a day, year in and year out, in the United States. The daily average of executions is two, and the average of lynchings three; but last year the number of persons killed had risen from twenty to thirty per day. Five years ago the daily average was only twelve. A community in which murder increases nearly threefold in five years is clearly retrograding towards barbarism, and what makes matters worse is that Judge Parker attributes this deplorable result to the direct action of the Appellate Courts. There are many other causes, such as the indifference of the people to the enforcement of the criminal law; but the chief cause is the fact that the Appellate Court has become the greatest of all promoters of crime by its constant, strenuous efforts to contrive by every technical pretext to quash a conviction.

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TWO ARTICLES FOR BORDERLAND."

Mr. Hargrove, the new President of the Theosophical Society in the United States, gives a very rose-coloured account of the flourishing condition of Theosophy across the Atlantic. Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland, in an article entitled "Dreams and their Mysteries," sets forth with a good deal of eloquence and ingenuity her theory that

dreams are often largely a revival of inherited memories. As migratory birds inherit the memory of the route which they must follow across oceans and continents which they have never had an opportunity of exploring, so every human being inherits the memory of all his ancestors, which, however, are latent, excepting in sleep, when they are fitfully revived. She maintains that those whose ancestors have always lived in Europe and America never dream of anything happening in Asia, Africa or Australia. This is a generalisation which seems to be based upon very inadequate foundation. Her article is, however, very interesting, and together with Mr. Hargrove's will be found noticed at some length in Borderland.

THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF ROME.

Professor R. Lanciani has a very interesting account of the extent to which the Romans of the Republic economised space by building into the sky. The tenement houses under Augustus were run up to 70 feet in height, while in Berlin to-day the maximum height is 36 feet, in Vienna 45 feet, and in Paris 631, and those heights are only permitted when the street is as broad as the buildings are high. Tenement houses, however, were not so lofty as the Imperial palaces, one of which rose 150 feet above a street which is only 12 feet across, while another was 180 feet. In modern Rome the new houses were run up from 100 to 120 feet high, and the Act of 1888, which fixed the maximum of height at one and a half times the width of the street, suddenly arrested building speculation. Mr. Lanciani admits that in Rome overcrowding is healthy rather than otherwise. The healthiest district in Papal Rome was the Ghetto, where 6,000 Jews were massed together in very lofty buildings. They know something about crowding, too, in Italy; for a recent municipal law of the city of Milan has ordered that no more than fourteen people should sleep in the same room! Another interesting point in this article is that Nero deserves the chief credit for re-building Rome on sound principles. "He set the whole city on fire, and did it so cleverly that, although of the fourteen wards into which Rome had been divided by Augustus, three were annihilated, and seven for the greater part destroyed, not a single life was lost at the monstrous conflagration." The imperial architects had, therefore, a clear field for a healthy, habitable city.

IS THE WEST LOYAL?

Recent articles having raised the spectre of a possible war between the Western States of America and the East, Senator H. M. Teller, of Colorado, contributes a brief paper entitled "The Loyal West." He maintains that the West is certainly not going to secede because the East believes it is destined to dominate the West. If the East were to try to secede the West would prevent it. Every year the centre of population goes westward, and in a few years it will be west to the Mississippi River.

REV. P. W. DITCHFIELD in Gentleman's recalls many exciting incidents in the career of highwaymen on Bagshot Heath and in Berkshire generally. He reminds us that Dick Turpin's famous ride to York on Black Bess is a myth, or rather a compounding of the ride to York on a bay mare of the highwayman Nicks about 1676, and the capture and execution of Dick Turpin at York in 1739. Harrison Ainsworth, in his "Rookwood," was the fiction

weaver.

THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

I HAVE to congratulate Mr. St. Loe Strachey upon the brilliant success he has achieved in bringing out the first number of the new series of the Cornhill Magazine. The Cornhill in its time has had many vicissitudes. It was the first magazine to achieve a great popularity, as many as 124,000 copies of the first number were sold, nor is it surprising considering the fact that Thackeray edited it, and gathered around it so brilliant a staff of artists and writers. Among the contributors for the year 1860 were Tennyson, Ruskin, Lockyer, Mrs. Browning, Swinburne, Lord Lytton, and Adelaide Procter. Among the other contributors were Washington Irving, Sir John Herschell, G. H. Lewis, Matthew Arnold, FitzJames Stephen, Harriet Martineau, and Anthony Trollope. Several years later the Cornhill renewed its youth by coming out at sixpence under the editorship of Mr. James Payn. It has now renewed its youth by taking Mr. St. Loe Strachey as editor, and has reverted to the price of one shilling, at which it was published under Thackeray. It has been enlarged and improved. The July number is capital from every point of view, with an up-to-date feel about it which gives the best promise for the future success of the new editor.

THACKERAY AS AN EDITOR.

Mrs. Ritchie contributes the first article, in which she utilises fragments from the volume of correspondence which poured into her father's hands during the two years that he first edited the Cornhill.

It was in the spring of 1862 that my father ceased to be editor of The Cornhill Magazine, although he went on writing for its columns to the end. After his death "Denis Duval' was published, with a note and introduction. It was not till after my father had resigned the editorship in 1862 that George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell joined the ranks of The Cornhill. "Romola" was brought out in the July number of the same year, 1862, and Mrs. Gaskell's novel of "Wives and Daughters" followed in 1864. Later on came Meredith and Hardy, and some of Mrs. Oliphant's finest work. Honoured hands had been at work for The Cornhill during all these years! Leighton's drawings for "Romola" are well known. Besides Lord Leighton's illustrations to " Romola," some of Richard Doyle's delightful cartoons had appeared there. Sir John Millais had been making striking designs for Trollope's stories, and Frederick Walker illustrating the "Story of Elizabeth," which story was published under my father's editorship.

Mrs. Ritchie speaks with enthusiasm of the publishers of the Cornhill, in fact everything relating to the Magazine appears to her in a rosy-coloured light.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SAVAGE.

One of the most remarkable features of the Magazine is the autobiography of a Soudanese soldier, dictated in Arabic to Captain Machell, late of the 12th Soudanese Regiment. Ali Effendi Gifoon, who at the present moment is fighting against the Dervishes on the Nile, is a remarkable man, whose memoirs are well worth publishing. In the July number we have the first chapter.

Born on the banks of the White Nile some sixty years ago, he hunted, fished, and fought, a naked savage, until he was about twenty-one years old. Then, falling by mischance into the hands of the Baggara Arabs, he was handed over a slave, as part of the Government tax, and became a soldier.

After fighting the Khedive's army in the Soudan for some years he was moved up to Egypt, and was sent as one of the negro battalion lent by the Khedive to Napoleon III. to Mexico, where he did good service.

Returning to Egypt, Ali Gifoon once more went to the Soudan, and was quartered on the borders of Abyssinia for some sixteen years. Then the Mahdi arose, and he relates his experiences of the rebellion and his final escape. On return to Egypt he was posted as an officer to the 10th Soudanese Battalion under Donne Bey, and in 1889 was promoted yousbashi (captain) into the 12th. In all the actions and expeditions which have taken place at Suakin, at Tokar, and on the Nile frontier in our own time, Ali Gifoon had been to the fore. On the line of march he leads the singing which carries the battalion along over miles of desert.

Captain Machell has done good service in tapping the mine of this veteran. It would be well if commanders of other native troops in various parts of our empire would take as much pains to ascertain the history and the opinions of the men under their command.

AN ARTICLE BY MR. GOLDWIN SMITH.

Mr. Goldwin Smith contributes a brief article on "Burke." It is too short to enable him to deal adequately with the theme, but one or two sentences may be quoted as indicating the line taken by Mr. Smith.

As a whole, the "Reflections on the French Revolution," considering the fearful gravity of the crisis and the dangerous character of the passions to which the appeal was addressed, can hardly be regarded otherwise than as a literary crime. The general view of the subject is not only inadequate, but false. Speaking of Burke's association with Fox, Mr. Smith' touches upon the question of the connection between private morality and politics.

Fox's character had been formed at the gambling table, and Napoleon was right in saying that he would never, if he could help it, employ a gambler. The recklessness of the gambling table was brought by Fox into the arena of public life. are asked whether we would have refused to accept a good measure from Mirabeau because he was a debauchee. We would not refuse to accept a good measure from Satan, but we have a shrewd though old-fashioned suspicion that Satan's private character would appear in his public conduct, as that of Mirabeau unquestionably did.

REINDEERS FOR SCOTLAND.

There is an excellent article on "Animal Helpers and Servers," by Mr. C. J. Cornish, in which he describes many services animals have been trained to render to men. He suggests that the large Chow dog from Northern China might form the basis of a new breed of cart dogs for minor traffic. They are immensely strong in the shoulder and have far greater pulling power than any of the breeds that in Holland and Belgium are used for drawing carts. Mr. Cornish also suggests that the reindeer might be introduced with advantage as a draught animal in the Highlands. He says:

The only animal which can travel at speed over heather and bog is the reindeer. Comparing his experience of the powers of draught of the reindeer on the "tundra" of the Arctic coast with the performance of ponies on the Scotch moors, Mr. A. Trevor-Battye declares that the former are in every way superior for the ordinary draught work at a Scotch shooting-lodge. They can travel at speed over the roughest heather, will swim or flounder over the wettest bog, still drawing their sledge, and would convey shooting parties, dead game, or provisions to and from the most distant and difficult ground at a speed of from ten to twelve miles an hour. The experiment of breeding young reindeer has already succeeded at Woburn Abbey, and before long some trial teams will be working in the Highlands.

OTHER ARTICLES.

Miss Kingsley, who writes with a charming, but somewhat too discursive pen, describes the "spooks" of the West African Coast, who seem to be even more fearsome

creatures than any of those which abound in more civilised lands. Mr. Strachey begins the publication of "Pages from a Private Diary," which he declares is as good a private and intimate journal as any of those that were kept in the last century. Very few people have time enough to make such lengthy entries in a private diary as are to be found in this publication. A private dairy written for public inspection is usually a very poor thing at the best. Sir M. E. Grant Duff, who is culpably idle with his pen, translates som jokes from an old French jest book, and Mr. Charles L. Graves publishes "The Malwood Eclogues," suggesting that Sir William Harcourt, in preparing a new edition of Virgil, would turn first of all to the Pollio, Virgil's passionate appeal for a new leader! Mr. Merriman is to begin a new serial as soon as Mr. Norris's "Clarissa Furioso" is concluded. After Mr. Merriman's story is done, Mr. Stanley Weyman and Mr. Crockett are to have their turn. I can see the advantage of announcing this in advance, but a judicious publisher should not bind himself too far ahead.

THE FREE REVIEW.

CONTRADICTION of the conventional always lends a flavour of piquancy to the contents of the Free Review, but the July number owes less of its interest to this cause than is usual. Democritus," indeed, inveighs against Drummond, Kidd and Calderwood as representing

biology with a snuffle." Mr. W. S. Sparrow charges woman with a grievous lack of the imaginative faculty. But most articles strike a positive note. Mr. J. M. Robertson supplies a study of Shakespeare and Montaigne, comparing the first (pirated) edition of Hamlet which came out in the same year as Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays, with later editions of the play, and showing how Shakespeare used the French author's ideas and even words. Mrs. Walter Grove discusses continuously what children should be told of religion and sexfunctions. "A Churchman," feeling that "the battle of the future will be between a consolidated Catholicism on the one hand and the allied forces of Agnosticism and irreligion on the other," demands that "the National Church" heal its own differences, and declares Home Reunion to be not only imperative, but practicable. 'The only inspired fount of infallibility. is a combined concentration of the Church, the Bible, private judgment, and the discoveries of Science, focussed on to the individual's intelligence." Mr. Tyrrell Baylee, with a view to prevent trades union tyranny, advocates the appointment of "workmen's friends," paid possibly by the State, to act as local mediators between masters and men. Mr. A. H. Williams urges the abolition of illegitimacy, pleading for a compulsory registration of both parents, and argues that the legal responsibility for offspring would act as an important deterrent. He imagines that this one source of over-population would be destroyed. He concludes with the modest demand that it be compulsory for every male to be legally married as soon as he reaches a proper age for such a union, and that the State afford a man the means of subsistence for himself, wife and offspring.

WITH the July number, the Savoy begins to appear monthly instead of quarterly. Mr. W. B. Yeats supplies the first of three papers on William Blake's illustrations (with examples) to the "Divine Comedy." Havelock Ellis continues his account of Nietzsche's ethics, and Edward Carpenter discourses explanatorily on the simplification of life. Arthur Symons heavily censures Zola's "Rome" as an encyclopædic essay and no romance.

UNITED SERVICE MAGAZINE. ADMIRAL SIR V. HAMILTON has the first place with an article on the "Manning of the Navy" in the United Service Magazine for July. Admiral Hamilton says that for his position in life the British man-of-war's man is as well off, if not better, than any class of the community, whereas the British merchant seamen are among the worst off, and the most unprotected portion of the community. He thinks that it is quite impossible that a man-of-war's man should descend to employment in the merchant service under its present conditions. Nearly half a million of British money paid to merchant seamen is mis-spent or stolen abroad. The article, which is somewhat discursive, then deals with the improvement that has been effected in midshipmen. He says that when he was commanding in China in 1885, he was surprised and gratified to find how immensely the seamen had improved in the last eighteen years. There was under his command only one black sheep, and he was only light-brown, and has subsequently done well. Colonel Pretyman describes what passed at Kabul in 1879 and 1880, when Cavagnari was killed, and General Roberts marched to Kabul to avenge his death. The article on the "First Invasion of the Soudan" describes how the Egyptians first became possessed of that region in 1820. Ismail, the son of Mohammed Ali, was at the head of the army of conquest, and in order to prove that he was doing his work, he used to send boxes of human ears regularly to his father at Cairo. His regular price was 50 piastres per ear, and not only were the ears of all those killed in battle cut off, but in intervals between the fights the Egyptian troops scoured the country ear-hunting. Wherever they found a native with ears, they cut them off, regardless of sex or age. It is satisfactory to know that Ismail was ultimately burned alive by a native chief whom he had insulted. There is an article on "Britain Impregnable," by J. C. Dunn. He is not in the army. His idea is that we should, to use his own phrase, “boerise" the whole country, namely, by devoting £2,000,000 a year to train 1,000,000 men in the use of the rifle. In his own village, he says, he is the only man who can use the rifle, but if rifles were supplied with ammunition, he would undertake to enrol 20 to 30, and possibly 50 m n. Then, waxing more sanguine as he goes on, he declares that, instead of 1,000,000 riflemen, he could easily raise 5,000,000 or 6,000,000. There is an article on the "Canadian Rebellion" of 1885. Captain Salusbury replies to the "Defenders of the Congo State," who have criticised his attack on the Belgian administration. There are other articles dealing with subjects of historic interest, relating to the service.

The Secret of the Bicycle's Popularity.

IN Scribner's Magazine, writing upon the cycle mania, which has attained greater dimensions in the United States than it has ever done in this country, the author says that the true secret of the bicycle's firm hold upon the public and its greatest value, is because it equalises men and women, weak, strong, dwarf and giant, all of whom, with comparatively small perseverance, can become as proficient for all practical purposes as the most handsomely endowed athlete of them all. Nothing else can compare to the wheel as a leaven for the heavy lump of joylessness in our streets. The "bike" goes farther towards filling the psychic and moral void in city life than in any other institution.

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The Review of Reviews, Volume 14