irritating scores, and become the brightest jewel in the imperial crown. With her dream of years fully realized, it seems reasonable to expect that Ireland would become England's stanch ally in the cause of universal peace.

With reference to that movement now on foot to promote closer and more amicable relations between England and this country, I am persuaded that the signing of a treaty of arbitration between Great Britain and the United States would not only be a source of incalculable blessings to these two great powers, but would go far toward the maintenance of permanent international peace throughout the civilized world.

Both of these great nations have many things in common. We speak the same noble tongue, and the English language is more generally used to-day than any other language on the face of the earth. The classic writers of England are also ours, and the classic authors of America are likewise claimed by Great Britain. The literature of both countries is a common heritage to both nations.

We also live under virtually the same form of government. The head of one nation is a king, the head of the other nation is a president; England is governed by a constitutional monarchy; the United States are ruled by a constitutional republic. And I believe that both of these nations have been more successful in adjust ing and reconciling legitimate authority with personal liberty than any other country of the world.

England is mistress of the ocean. Her ships ply through every sea on the globe. Her flag floats over every harbor of the world. Her empire embraces a territory comprising ten millions of square miles, or about one fifth of the whole globe. Great was the Roman Empire in the days of her imperial splendor. It extended into Europe as far as the River Danube, into Asia as far as the Tigris and Euphrates, and into Africa as far as Mauritania. And yet the Roman Empire was scarcely one sixth of the extent of the British Empire of to-day. It was Daniel Webster who,

in a speech delivered in the American Senate about sixty years ago, thus described the extent of the British possessions: "She has dotted the whole surface of the globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun and keeping company with the hours, encircles the earth with one unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

The United States rules nearly one hundred millions of happy and contented people. Our Government exercises a dominant and salutary influence over the entire American continent. And our influence is exerted not to destroy, but to save, not to dismember our sister republics, but to preserve their peace and autonomy.

If, then, England and America were to enter into an alliance of permanent arbitration with each other, such a bond of friendship and amity would be a blessing not only to these two great powers, but to all the nations of the civilized world.

When the waters receded from the earth after the deluge, Almighty God made a solemn covenant with Noah and his posterity that the earth should never again be destroyed by water, and, as a sign of this covenant, He placed a bow in the heavens. Let Britannia and Columbia join hands across the Atlantic, and their outstretched arms will form a sacred arch of peace which will excite the admiration of the nations, and will proclaim to the world. the hope that with God's help the earth shall never more be deluged with blood shed in fratricidal war.

The time seems to be most auspicious for the consummation of this alliance. It meets with the approval of the President of the United States, and I hope it will have the sanction of Congress now in session. It is strongly advocated by Sir Edward Grey, English Minister of Foreign Affairs, and hosts of the most distinguished citizens and statesmen of both countries. And it is my earnest prayer that all who are devoting themselves to this grand purpose may receive the reward promised by the Prince of Peace: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God."

HOPE FOR ANGLO-AMERICAN

THE

ARBITRATION

HERE ought to be a statute of limitations on the prophecies of national and international conflict-a time limit beyond which the prophets of evil would be silenced by ridicule. For forty years detractors of the French have told us of the instability of the republic, and yet it has gone on, amid all the perturbations of parties and factions, administering order as vigorously as the government of any other country, and to-day it is apparently the more firmly established for the perils it has passed, and for the fact that only the oldest generation of Frenchmen retain even the traditions of the monarchy. Again, ever since the Russo-Japanese War we have been told of the imminence of the danger of invasion of America by the hordes of "little brown men" who, "drunk with ambition," are supposed to be "looking for trouble," particularly with the United States, though everybody knows that it will take years of recuperation from Japan's victory over Russia before she can command financial resources sufficient for another contest. She is now wisely and steadfastly addressing herself to the work of internal economy and progress and, we believe, without the slightest idea of an infraction of the Monroe Doctrine, or of conflict with a people who from the day of Perry's expedition, over fifty years ago, have shown for her and received from her nothing but friendliness and sympathy.

In three years it will be a century since a hostile shot was fired between the two great branches of the English-speaking people, and yet, to judge from the attitude and alarms of certain interested parties, one might think that we were perpetually on the edge of an armed conflict. On the contrary, the fiber of our relations is of the firmest our commercial interests, in spite of particular rivalries, have in the main deep and inextricable roots; the bonds of our sympathies are many and

strong, and are yearly growing more so. If in England we are sometimes still reminded of "a certain condescension in foreigners," it is more and more confined to negligible classes-knights of the drawingroom or boors of the railway train-of whom we have noble imitations in our own country. In any matter of real consequence there is, if not complete agreement, at least a basis of good understanding. Mutual respect exists between the cultivated people of the two countries, along any common line, whether it be literature, education, science, or finance. The time has come to put this international sympathy beyond the reach of the remotest peril.

We are now confronted with a great opportunity. President Taft, with the jurist's respect for law and the Chief Executive's sense of responsibility, following up the success of his treaty with Japan, which removes for at least twelve years the possibility of war, has addressed himself to the larger problem of arbitration of all questions which may arise between Great Britain and America. He has thrown down a gage of peace which has been promptly taken up by Sir Edward Grey, the British Minister for Foreign Affairs. In the effort to bring about this desideratum, which President Cleveland advocated in vain, and perhaps prematurely, he has the overwhelming support of intelligent American public sentiment. There is no less cordial support for the idea in England, but it is recognized that the chief obstacle lies here, in the constitutional prerogative of the Senate (its duty as well as its right) to "advise and consent" in the enactment of treaties. So, although the country has rapidly advanced to the position of the President that questions of national honor may well be included in the subjects of arbitration, it must be patient with its representatives in the Senate in their practical handling of the problem. Senators, on their part, have a right to ask that public opinion in favor of the largest measure of arbitration must be unmistakably mani

fested. This being done, they should feel it their privilege as well as their duty to work out the details of the project within constitutional limitations. That way, for them and the country, honor lies.

It must not be forgotten that in recent years the international opinion which creates international law has made great progress. In a series of distinguished and authoritative addresses on this subject delivered at Columbia University in March and April of this year, Dr. David J. Hill, American Ambassador to Germany, said:

A sovereign State has no right to take up arins against another, unless a right has been denied or an injury inflicted by it for which reparation cannot otherwise be obtained; and it has no "right," which any modern State could consistently recognize, in any case, to impose such arbitrary conditions of peace as the victor pleases.

Again, he says:

There has been in the past few decades a gradual recognition of the fact that it is no derogation to the sovereignty of a constitutional State to submit the question of its rights and duties to impartial judicial decision.

And in his peroration he admirably summed up the new conception of international duty-at once Christian and economic in these words:

if we may estimate the future by the transformations of the last three hundred years, we may reasonably entertain the hope that the energies of mankind may be more and more diverted from plans and preparations for mutual destruction, and devoted to united helpfulness in overcoming vice, misery, disease, and ignorance, the common enemies of man.

In this movement the question of an "alliance" or even of an entente between the countries is preposterous. It is not to be inferred from an agreement of two nations to arbitrate prospective difficulties that they shall agree to fight each other's battles. The permanent peace we desire with England we desire also with France and Germany and other countries. The problems of the world have much in com

LXXXII-38

mon, and those of the two great Englishspeaking nations are in many points identical, being largely concerned with the question whether we shall preserve the traditions of popular freedom which have come down from the same Anglo-Saxon sources. In the spirit of the broadest fellowship and the truest ideality we may well say to England:

To-day, not moved by memory or fear,
But by the vision of a nobler time,
Millions cry toward thee in a passion of

peace.

We need thee, England, not in armed array
To stand beside us in the empty quarrels
That kings pursue, ere War itself expire
Like an o'er-armored knight in desperate
lunge

Beneath the weight of helmet and of lance;
But now, in conflict with an inner foe
Who shall in conquering either conquer

both.

For it is written in the book of fate:
By no sword save her own falls Liberty.

THE LESSON OF SIMPLICITY

T every turn of the wheel which

Adjusts the focus of modern under

standing to the follies and extravagances of ancient Rome, -as so clearly and pertinently set forth by Professor Ferrero in his CENTURY papers on "The Women of the Cæsars,"-no truth is more obvious than the close relation of simple tastes to the efficiency of a nation.

In the last hundred years of the republic, when wealth was becoming general among the influential families, it was esteemed more as an aid to family prestige than as a means of personal indulgence. No matron was so high in the social scale as to be independent of the practical cares of her household. No man could enjoy the esteem of his fellows, and much less place himself in the way of social or political influence, without a certain austerity of ideas and manners. Robust tastes prevailed among all classes of men, and simplicity. in dress was almost an unchanging fashion, as is attested by the statues and basreliefs of the Julian period.

Though Rome had been sacked by the Gauls more than three hundred years before Cæsar brought them under the yoke, the steadily advancing culture of the an

cient capital suffered no further injury. from the barbarous hordes of the north, until four centuries of decay had followed upon the brutalities and excesses of the line of profligate emperors derived from the family of Augustus.

Modern life appears to be so much more complex than ancient society, mainly owing to devices for extending the horizon of easy intercourse and multiplying the means of physical convenience, and also owing to greater public security, which invites wider social and intellectual interests, that a comparison with the old, as to degrees of luxury and profligacy, is difficult, and liable to be misleading. Unpleasant resemblances to the worst Roman tendencies are noticeable to-day. The dominating note, in the expression of the longings of rich and poor, alike, is certainly not that of simplicity. But the world never will, because it never can, change in the requisites of human happiness and human security: the first depends on wise occupation, temperate enjoyment, and spiritual thinking, just as the second rests on general honesty, filial devotion, and patriotic duty. Here, as in ancient Rome, these desirable things are all a part of the lesson of simplicity.

"MUNICIPAL NON-PARTIZANSHIP IN OPERATION": A CORRECTION

N an article by James Creelman, pubNana in the September number of

THE CENTURY under the above title, occurs an error which Mr. Creelman desires the editor to correct. Speaking of reforms which were among the early acts of Mayor Gaynor, the article says on page 670:

There were discrepancies discovered in the accounts of the Water Registrar in Brooklyn and he was dismissed from office. The whole system of collecting water taxes was completely reorganized.

Mr. William R. McGuire is and has been since January 1, 1904, the Water Registrar of the Borough of Brooklyn, he not having been removed from office, as stated in the article. THE CENTURY takes pleasure in making this correction, and in justice to Mr. McGuire we wish to state without reservation that the writer of the article was misinformed, that the reflection on him and his administration as Water Registrar was erroneous, and that an injustice was done to an honest public official. EDITOR OF THE CENTURY MAGAZINE.

bouquet, fancy being slapped in the face, generically speaking, that way! As you say, it must have quite taken away your appetite had you not already been dieting for incipient fat. And your French being restricted to polite expressions, you were powerless to denounce him! I suppose he judged you by your frock, the Parisian origin of which of course he recognized. But whenever did a woman's evening clothes measure up, even approximately, to her real self? Really I think it ground for a great, impersonal, international libel suit, only that would upset the entente cordiale, besides jeopardizing Freddie's chances as ambassador. So get up your defense, using the dictionary freely. Then when the creature pays his dinner call, you can overwhelm him with a spontaneous burst of eloquence. It will be all the easier to confound since, as luck has it, truth is on your side.

No, my dear; we can place our hands upon our hearts and truthfully affirm that the young American matron, taken at her best, is anything but frivolous in her relation to hearth and home, or, more technically, furnace and flat. True, superficially, she has her faults. Mentally, below her accomplished crust, she often is only a halfbaked affair, because life's New-World fires burn too perfervidly. In her youth, too, she cultivates an over-smart, challenging tone, based on epigrammatic fiction, toward masculinity, the habit of which besets maturer days; but beneath this effervescence is a structural ideal of domestic duty, of wifehood and motherhood, as solid as Plymouth Rock, well-intentioned as the Constitution, and good as daily bread.

Frivolous? Why, take your own case, which typifies that of thousands upon thousands. Since the advent of your first-born, what has your boudoir been but a laboratory, your art an exhibit of Charts of Weight Requirements, your literature Dr. Holt on "The Care and Feeding of Children," your conversation an inquisition into the merits of nurses and governesses, your recreation a Child-Welfare Educational Campaign, your very life one long sterilizing process? And little Frederic, while still a pultaceous mass of protoplasm, with no appreciable chronology behind him, did he not represent an economic proposition, a problem in pædeutics, of the highest order?

Recall that sacred moment when for the first time the nurse permitted you to gaze upon your child. While endeavoring to trace in its amorphous features some resemblance to Freddie or yourself, how heroically you struggled with your prehistoric longing to clasp the tiny bundle to your breast and cover it with obsolescent kisses.

But sternly waving it aside, you said you wished to be so perfect with your son and never let him have to reproach his mother with giving him a germ! Beautiful! The Spartan mother with all the modern improvements! As for the nurse, far be it from me to impugn her certificated character, or I should have said she used a wad of absorbent cotton to wipe away a furtive tear.

Then there was that lunch where a woman-the kind that tries to prove a sense of humor by relating anecdotes-told how a young Boston matron, a Radcliffe graduate, snatched her baby from a burning building and pressed it to her anguished brain. Do you think one of her female hearers was so frivolous as to crack a smile? Dropping their forks in outraged concert, as a single mother they exclaimed, "Oh, did n't she know that no infant ought ever to be snatched from anything in any circumstances, or pressed to any part of any one whatever!" Again beautiful, not to say sublime! The Spartan mother plus the Puritan; Boadicea and Cornelia of the Gracchi rolled into one! How foolish this makes the old poets seem, does n't it? Fancy that benighted Wordsworth with these unhygienic lines

Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,

With light upon him from his father's eyes!

Nor has your noble vigilance for one instant been relaxed. Never has our precious problem in pædeutics escaped from under the microscope of enlightened parental observation. How anxiously you watched lest the one tuft of hair on the otherwise bald crown should indicate abnormal musical proclivities! How freely you encouraged the child while still in petticoats to express his own preference for Yale or Harvard! How bravely you have guarded him from the sentimental influences of old friends from the country and mid-Victorian blood-relatives!

And, speaking of the sentiment-microbe, you have been greatly helped by the Passing of the Grandmother as such. Since elderly women have discarded the lace cap in favor of the combings of Chinamen, they have ceased to invade the nursery and play havoc with its regulations on the score of grandmotherhood. As a matter of fact, I think you told me the two ladies who stand in that relation to little Frederic did not set eyes on him till he had cut his first tooth, Freddie's mother having a bridge club at the only hour the nurse allowed her charge to be exhibited, while your own mother was at rehearsals, posing as a flower-girl in a pageant for some charity.

Yes, the traditional grandmother will soon have to be explained in foot-notes, while the Hand that Rocks the Cradle is already