It is both puzzling and disappointing to find the people of the Balkan States-the Servians, the Bulgarians, and the Greeks— engaged in a bloody internecine war after they had won the admiration of the world by uniting to drive Turkish misrule from the Balkan Peninsula. Moreover, their union was apparently based upon the highest sentiments of patriotism, personal sacrifice, and human liberty. On these grounds they appealed to the world, and won the sympathy of every lover of human freedom.

These allies, once united in what seemed to be the finest bonds of brotherhood, are now engaged not only in killing each other, but in accusing each other of greed, selfishness, and treachery.

The condition of antagonism, jealousy, and suffering now existing in the Balkan Peninsula is strikingly set forth in three documents which we print on another page-two of them being cablegrams addressed to Mr. Roosevelt and received during his absence, while the third is a letter from an official of the Greek Government. The situation is such as almost to convert the American observer to Austria's belief that she alone, by imposing her authority throughout the Balkan Peninsula, can restore order and maintain peace in that unhappy region.

But, taking things at their worst, there is ground for hope that the Allies may come to their senses and may settle their personal quarrels without involving European intervention or the entire loss of the world's sympathy. The appeal to Mr. Roosevelt from Bulgaria and the letter to The Outlook from the Greek Consul, to which we have already referred, while they are accusatory in temper, really indicate that the Greeks and the Bulgars desire the good opinion of civilized men, and are now awakening to the necessity of regaining that good opinion.

The experience of Italy throws some light upon the evolutionary process which is going on in the Balkan States. In the first half of the nineteenth century the Italian principalities, disunited by dialects, jealousies, religious creeds, and ambitious monarchies, united under the pressure of a patriotic desire to expel the Austrian invader. When the Austrian was driven out, the old sources of conflict reasserted themselves, and bitterest political and physical conflicts within the

boundaries of Italy itself were brought to an end only by the long-suffering genius of Cavour, who, with the co-operation of the great and generous spirit of Victor Emmanuel, established Italian peace and stability.

There are to-day in the Balkan States, so far as we can see, no Victor Emmanuels and no Cavours. But who knows that they may not be brought forth out of the period of labor through which the Peninsula is passing? When that great birthday comes, it may usher in-we hope it will usher in—a real Balkan Federation.

AN INVIGORATING NOVEL

Two novels which are interesting many readers differ radically in manner and in construction but have one subject in common: the influence of the man who deals with business as an isolated activity and not as a human relationship; and the attention which these stories are receiving is due in no small measure to the growing sense of social responsibility. "V. V.'s Eyes" has a narrower compass and is in a lighter vein than "The Inside of the Cup" (Macmillan), but it is not less serious in spirit; the style is more indirect and often forced, but effective for its purpose. The central figure of the story does not formulate his social creed, but he is quite as much in earnest as the young clergyman whose career Mr. Churchill dramatizes in a series of vividly told experiences. "V. V." does not rationalize the situation; he is one of those well-born souls who seem to find their places in the world without searching, who are normally good without a suggestion of piety, and who speak and act ⚫ not so much from a painfully acquired conviction as from that direct perception which, in dealing with human relations, is a form of moral genius. Some one has said that he belongs to the little company of God's Fools," who live as the birds live, without thought for food or house or raiment, concerned only with the care of others.

"The Inside of the Cup" is, on the other hand, the story of man who, at the start, is hardly aware that there is either an intellectual or a social problem, and whose coming into this knowledge is a birth into the world of strife. "V. V." has but a single problem to solve, and he is hardly aware that it is a problem; it is, rather, a way of life; he knows that there are many who are not walking in it, but he is hardly conscious that

he is walking in it; for him there is no other way.

Hodder, the central figure in Mr. Churchill's story, finds that way only through great confusion and darkness. To him it is a problem, not a divination; something to be worked out rather than thought out, and the answer to which comes through experience rather than as the result of an intellectual process. Hodder begins as a conservative rector of an affluent country parish. He is well educated, he has a deeply religious nature inclined to asceticism, he preaches to a wellbred congregation in comfortable circumstances. He is at times uncomfortably direct, and there are those who see in him the possibilities of something like fanaticism. He is not wholly at peace with himself, but he is as yet outside the circle of modern thought, and he is brought in contact neither with social injustice nor with the misery of a host of working people.

Then comes a call to an old, wealthy parish in a Western city, and he takes the leadership of a church from which the shifting of population is draining the class from which its parishioners have been drawn. The locality has lost its old-time social distinction, and the slum has come so close to the doors of the church that it is impossible to escape the searching questions which it puts to those who have any sense of social responsibility. The most prominent supporter of the parish is a capitalist of high outward respectability, whose conception of life is in the barbaric stage in which every man looks out for himself and no man spares his dearest friend when it comes to a matter of business. This unhappy man has so paralyzed normal human feeling that the dreadful fate of Midas has overtaken him; everything he touches turns to gold.

He blights every life he ought to nourish, and his world is as desolate as a valley through which a volcano has poured its tide of lava. His wife has withered and died; his daughter leaves him to escape suffocation; his son is alienated by a hardness of purpose which is not inconsistent with a selfish affection. The girl whom both ought to help is driven to a life of shame by the relentless and unseeing father; those who have been beggared by his merciless business methods curse him, and the scoffers find in his prominence in the affairs of the church occasion for scornful criticism.

The young preacher finds himself confronted with a problem which evokes all his

spiritual gallantry, and in dealing with it his faith is changed from a traditional basis to one of personal experience, and his concep tion of the function of the church from that of witnessing to great truths to the applica tion of those truths to the conditions in the next street. Mr. Churchill has not only stated the problem in its most extreme terms, but he has made its solution involve a revolution in the spiritual and intellectual life of the preacher, and his personal happiness as well.

The situation for the preacher is one of great difficulty, but the perplexity of it is lessened by the very extreme terms in which it is stated; it is presented in unshaded black and white; in actual experience the lines are usually much less distinct and the issue is not so sharply defined. The Inside of the Cup" is the story of a clear-cut fight for the soul of a church; the preacher is face to face with the problem of dealing with a man who stands for the church and who is, so far as the greater Christian virtues are concerned, a whited sepulcher. All attempts to bring this dead soul to life having failed, there is but one way left to save the church from the contamination of corruption, and Hodder takes that way without flinching. He is a true priest alike in his fearless denunciation of corruption and his ministry of mercy to the victims.

This is a very sincere story by a very earnest man, who has tried to dramatize two of the most fundamental experiences through which many open-minded religious men are passing to-day. It has fine qualities, as all Mr. Churchill's stories have, and it ought to be in the hands of every religious teacher; the situation which confronts thinking men who must verify historical statements of faith by their own knowledge of life, and must make an inherited creed a personal conviction by experience, is stated with such energy that, whether a man accepts the conclusions or rejects them, he will get a clearer view of the perplexities which beset many of the men who sit in the pews of the churches to-day.

The intellectual struggle is described too much in detail, and the arguments presented sometimes lack the convincing force which moved Hodder from point to point. The most transparent sincerity will not take the place of the expert's knowledge when one is dealing in detail with matters which have been in discussion for centuries. Robert Elsmere" was written by a very able woman who, although not an original investigator,

of God" looking down upon him, and he will be safe once more.

It has been truly said somewhere that a man never really possesses anything until he has abandoned it to Heaven, honestly letting it go, and Heaven has then surprised him by giving it back to him. With only a few treasures among the many which we clutch and relinquish will Heaven ever reward us thus; but they are the only things worth having, they are the inalienable possessions of our souls.

It is strange that we do not realize this. A good for which we must scheme and strive,

over the precariousness of which we must hold our breath, is not solidly good at all; it is a transient vexation. The real goods of life are as surely ours as the dawn; there is no escaping them.

Therefore, from all this, it follows that the one thing needful for any human being to know is the will of God. There lies our duty and our deep content. There lies our only chance of making our existence at all worth while there lies the significance and salvation of the universe. The Kingdom will come as soon as the Will is done. Let us not thwart it.

T

HE word banker exercises great influence in every community. This is partly because it implies the possession of money, and the man with money. unquestionably possesses power. It is also partly because the bankers of the United States are the well-to-do men, the men of education and general intelligence, the men who move in good society, and this implies intellectual power. The average American

has, it is true, an exaggerated respect for money, but he also has a highly commendable respect for intellectual power.

If a merchant, or a teacher, or an editor, or even a President of the United States, expresses an opinion on a matter of finance, it is often said that the opinion cannot be worth much because the man who utters it is not a "financier." If a banker, however, says something on finance, no matter how dogmatic, it is accepted as the word of an expert-as though an astronomer should speak about the stars, or a metallurgist about mining, or a chemist about the analysis of food, or a doctor about anatomy.

Now, as a matter of fact, a banker is not necessarily always a financier. A banker, according to the "Century Dictionary," is "one who traffics in money;" a financier is "an officer who is intrusted with the control of financial interests; one who regulates or manages the public revenues."

One might as well say that all manufac

turers are political economists as to assume that all bankers are financiers. The greatest financiers of modern times were not bankers at all. Think of their names: Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, Salmon P. Chase, William Windom, William E. Gladstone.

Hamilton was a publicist from very young manhood; Gallatin was a merchant, a farmer, and a teacher of French in Harvard College; Chase and Windom were lawyers; and Gladstone, than whom there has perhaps never been a greater financier in the English-speaking world, who shaped budgets and planned financial legislation with consummate skill, was much more interested in English theology and Greek literature than he was in "trafficking in money."

We have no wish to detract from the deservedly high esteem in which American bankers are held. They are a fine body of men. They perform a great public service in looking with fidelity after the money of their shareholders and their depositors; but there is a popular fallacy that they are somehow or other specially designed by Providence to shape the financial legislation of this country because they are daily handling money.

We think this fallacy ought to be frankly attacked. If it is a correct principle that the man who daily handles a commodity knows all about the laws which govern its production and distribution, then the cotton-spinner ought to be able to tell you how to eradicate the boll

weevil; the coal-miner ought to be able to tell you what kind of a grate-bar and how much forced draught will give you the best steam power in a battle-ship; the bookbinder ought to make a good critic of poetry, and barbers should make successful professors of psychology!

Nor is the business man, who, naturally and properly, is primarily concerned in a reasonable profit from the development of his business, always the best judge of the fundamental laws that govern that develop

ment.

When George Stephenson made the locomotive practicable, and introduced the steam railways into England, the owners and dealers in horses fought him tooth and nail because, they said (and, what is worse, believed), he was going to destroy all business done with horses. What is the actual result? The steam railway has done more than any other single industrial agency to develop the horse business and promote the welfare of the horse dealer.

When Sprague and Westinghouse and their co-laborers developed the trolley car, the railways fought the suburban and interurban trolley; the railway men said that the trolley would ruin their business; but the results soon showed that the trolleys were a great feeder of the railway; and now we can hardly take the trolleys from the railways by drastic legislation, so attached to them. have the railway managers become.

The bankers opposed the introduction of the Postal Savings Bank into this country. Those bankers who were engaged in the management of savings banks were especially vehement in their opposition. The latter, in their National Convention, condemned the postal savings banks on the ground that it was going to destroy their business. event has proved that they were mistaken. The striking group of telegrams printed on the following pages show clearly that the savings banks have not only not suffered but have benefited from the introduction of the Postal Savings Bank.

The

The railway managers of the country used every political and persuasive power they possessed to prevent, ten years ago, the passage of the Hepburn Railway Rate Law, by which the railways of the country were put under the regulation of a permanent and able Inter-State Commerce Commission. The railway men, in all sincerity no doubt, asserted that the Hepburn Law was going to destroy

their business. The law was passed in spite of their protest, and its operation has been of the greatest pecuniary benefit to the railway transportation business of this country. Some of the firmest friends to-day of the Inter-State Commerce Commission and of the principle of Government regulation of railways are found among the railway men themselves.

Here are four instances of sagacious, practical business men, deceived or prejudiced by their own self-interest, opposing legislation the practical effect of which was to promote their welfare and prosperity.

The analogy, we think, is plain. The bankers of the country who are opposing the Currency Bill of the Wilson Administration are not only making a patriotic mistake, but are really obstructing their own progress.

If the bill is enacted into law, as we believe and hope it will be, we do not hesitate to assert that the bankers of the country will be the first to rush to its defense if it is threatened in any way.

There is not a banker in the country who does not feel the need in his own business of an elastic currency, such as is described in the Little Catechism on money which we print on page 801. There is not a banker in the country; who has given any thought to the matter, who does not know that the bill now before Congress provides on the whole an excellent plan for making our bank currency elastic. One of the ablest and most public-spirited bankers of New York, Mr. A. Barton Hepburn, Chairman of the Currency Commission of the American Bankers' Association, calls the bill drawn by Representative Glass "a very good bill in its general features and purpose. What, then, is the specific reason why the representatives of National banks throughout the country are opposing the bill? Here is the reason, pointedly expressed in a resolution of a group of sixty bankers, representing the Middle West, held in Omaha a week or two ago:

We contend that the system of control devised is inherently wrong in this: that the banks furnishing the capital of the Federal Reserve Bank are practically denied a voice in their management, which will be placed in the hands of a body of men whose relations to the business will be political and possibly partisan.

This is the old cry against Government regulation which the railways made ten years ago when the Hepburn Rate Bill was passed.

The Administration Currency Bill provides