were to convert us to some new belief, to some new religion, we listened intently, awestruck with expectation. "What I have said, I have said." He would not be convinced.

Jusuph left the house like a martyr, a saint, that had cried in the wilderness.

Father was pale and unsteady on his feet. It was clear he regretted the oath he had taken not to offer more than that sum of gold pieces. The hour of our departure approached. Suddenly I had an idea.

"I have five gold pieces of my own. I can give them to him, and so what you have said is said, and you will have the pistols," I cried, hugging myself to father's breast.

"You are as good a son as Hazi is a daughter," my father answered, "but it cannot be. We must leave instantly."

"Hazi!" I called. She appeared.

"Take these five gold pieces to your father as a present from me and let him come immediately."

She trembled. Father put his hand on my shoulders.

"Put your gold pieces in your pocket. The mules are here. Come," he urged.

"But, Father, Father," I begged, "let me do that for you!"

"Come; we leave."

Murad and his wives had bidden us godspeed earlier in the day. My pain for my father's anguish was stronger than my love for Hazi. I was hardly thinking of her when we left.

When we had passed the gates of Damascus astride our mules, I asked father:

"Why have you not allowed me to help you? Should five pieces of gold

stand between you and your desire?”

"Now I will tell you," father answered. "These pistols don't belong to Jusuph. They are Murad's heirlooms, and are not for sale at any price; but as Jusuph is a merchant by nature, he pays rent to keep them in his bazaar, just so as to have something to haggle about, to keep alive. His daughter Hazi serves Murad for the rent of those pistols. I have given Jusuph a fine battle. Fancy how dangerously near I was to accede to his price!"

"And you have known it all the time?"

"I had heard about it through a friend of mine five years ago. It was why I wanted to come to Damascus. Too bad he has fallen on such evil days! He is a great merchant."

"And, Hazi, Father? Hazi?”

"She will serve Murad for the rent of those pistols as long as her father lives. She loves her father."

I returned to Damascus five years later. Jusuph was still selling those six pistols. Hazi served Murad for them. Then Akaab died. Hazi shot him while he was attempting to stab me, treacherously coming up from behind.

The other day I heard myself saying to our son:

"Come to Damascus. Come to Damascus, the old city of Damascus." Come to Damascus, the old city of Damascus!

The sand-laden wind of the desert polishes the tops of the mushroomlike, flat, round towers. Patches of gold glitter in the sun, when the sirocco, the wind of the desert, has let up. Come to the city of the califs, Damascus, the most beautiful city of the world.

T

HE contrast in religion between the New World and the Old is a difficult point to emphasize, and that for three reasons.

First, that modern men have forgotten the social effect of religion, ascribing to almost any other cause, economic or physical, what is in truth the result of men's doctrines.

Secondly, that modern men hold doctrines without defining them; therefore without knowing they hold them.

Thirdly, that, after language, the one point in which a false similarity most masks the essential difference between America and England is the point of religion.

Religion is at the root of all culture, and societies differ more from difference in religion than from difference in any other factor. It is more powerful than race, far more powerful than physical environment. If any one doubts this, let him consider the example of Islam. One culture covering such races as negroes on the one hand, Berbers (who in feature are indistinguishable from Europeans) on the other hand, and every sort of type intermediary between, or external to, these, cuts off a whole section of humanity from the rest of the race and stamps it with a particular mark never to be mistaken.

Now, as I have said, in religion the United States would seem to offer less

contrast to Europe, and especially to England, than in any other social factor, with the exception of language. They form part of the general culture of Christendom, but they have also in particular the same essential of varying, independent Protestant religious bodies which are the special mark of England. In the United States, as in England, you find great Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian, Methodist, and other communities; you find the small, wealthy, highly cultivated Unitarian body centered there in Massachusetts, as you find it centered upon Birmingham and the Midlands in England. You find what is essentially the same communion as the Church of England under the title of Episcopalian; a similar congeries is not to be found in any European country besides England.

The similarity is striking, and might be thought conclusive against the thesis I have elsewhere maintained; for while we know that similarity in language has no necessary correspondence with similarity in social structure and spirit, with religion it is powerfully otherwise, and a similar religious system should, it would seem, produce a similar society.

And so it would were that similarity exact; but, as in the case of language, it acts rather as a mask for what is at the root a profound, increasing, and

operative contrast which is driving the two worlds apart. And the contrast lies in these two things: first, that the balance of religious communities is very different in one case from what it is in the other; secondly, that America stands apart from the interactions of European thought.

These two characteristics in the religious situation of the New World develop a continually widening divergence from that of the Old, and are overshadowed, like everything making up American society, by that mysterious, but undeniable and potent, influence which is the genius of the place, and which gives it, in our European eyes, a wholly foreign tone.

The balance of various religious bodies is the first point of difference I have noted, and it is capital. By the proportion of the ingredients it is that bodies in the physical world differ. The same ultimate constituents combined in one fashion produce coal and in another the diamond: in the one case the Roman cement of three thousand years, in another crumbling rubbish. So it is in the spiritual world, in the ultimate forces which make mankind and produce a state. Proportion determines; number rules.

In Europe as a whole religion is today marshaled in two camps, mainly regional. The one is that which has kept in continuity with tradition, and comprises France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, the valleys of the Rhine and the Danube, and Ireland. Throughout that region there is a minority, always very small (insignificant in Italy and Belgium and Spain, less than three per cent. in France, much more intermixed upon the Rhine and the Danube), which takes its character from the Reformation, and is, in ethics, if no

longer in doctrine, Protestant; but the tone of all that region is traditional and Catholic; nor is this truth affected by that by-product of Catholicism which we call "anti-clericalism." A man of this culture may most sincerely hate the organization and power of the Catholic Church, he may combat it to the full as a tyrannical and degrading falsehood, yet will he show in all his manner of speech and in all the fundamental social ideas which he takes for granted that he is of the traditional culture and alien to the Protestant North. M. Clemenceau is an excellent example of what I mean by this. Further, the small Protestant bodies within the Catholic culture of Europe, even where they have great power through their wealth, as in France, are strongly affected by the social atmosphere about them. In general you may say (under all those qualifications which are necessary to any simple statement of a complicated organic thing) that Europe south and west of a certain line is Catholic. Similarly you may say that Europe north and west of a certain line is Protestant.

That line is accurately traced on the very excellent German modern atlases, where difference of religion and every other point on which statistical information is available are set forth. It is a line running first west of old Serbia, then following the Danube and, roughly speaking, the Carpathians, cutting across Galicia, and going nearly straight northward to within a day's journey of the Baltic; thence it runs westward through the mountains which frame the Bohemian plain, then turns north again toward the mouths of the Rhine, passes down the English Channel, and rises northward again to include Ireland, with the exception of

The Protestant religion gives you England and Scotland, the northern Netherlands (that is, Holland), north Germany, Scandinavia, Finland, and land south of the Gulf of Finland.

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The characteristics of this culture as a whole are its high proportion of industrialism. In its agricultural part, under suitable conditions, such as Norway and most of the Protestant Swiss district, a highly democratic organization of peasant owners; but under the more complicated conditions, which are the rule, an aristocratic organization, the land held by a wealthy governing class, and the mass of the people working under them as dependents. Further, during the last century the center of gravity of Europe in wealth, and in other social factors more and more until the Great War, lay within the Protestant North. The Catholic South, even with the inclusion of France, became more and more imitative of the Protestant North. The latter affirmed its own superiority and believed in it, while the former was subject to violent internal strain through the great quarrel everywhere at work, but first of all in France, between the organization of the Catholic Church and the civil power. Moreover, the two typical instances of Ireland and Poland up to the Great War affected the mind of Europe. Both were subject Catholic nations, controlled against their wills by powers alien to and inimical to the Catholic Church. Many of the Poles, of course, had the privilege of a milder subjection within the Austrian Empire, where they exercised considerable

western section of Poland was under the heel of Berlin, and the no less intensely Catholic Irish were under the foreign government of London. No corresponding subjection of a Protestant society to one of Catholic culture existed, and such a picture affected the general judgment, tending to persuade it that the one culture, the Catholic, was declining, the other, the Protestant, advancing.

Now, in the United States there was no such regional division. That continent (it is no less) presented a totally different arrangement of spiritual forces. The main of the country's tradition was Protestant, and even Puritan. The spiritual forces opposed to this tradition, active skepticism upon the part of an important few, the Catholic organization of many millions, were scattered, interpenetrating the whole body; regional indeed to this extent, that the Catholic forces, weak or almost unknown in vast agricultural districts, were always powerful and sometimes overwhelming in the great towns. But there was, and is, in the United States no distinction by district between a Catholic and a Protestant culture. The culture of the whole was Protestant; the Catholic element, comparatively recent as a weighty factor, was a dispersed minority controlling far less than its numerical share of wealth and influence.

Here, then, was a balance in proportion, a setting together of elements quite different in pattern from what ruled in Europe; a system which you may find in certain small districts of Europe, but not in Europe as a whole. The Protestant capitals of Europe are aware of the Catholic capitals; the two spiritual forces in Europe are polar

ized, and reactions between the two camps are continual and active. There are no Catholic capitals in the United States.

When we turn to the special contrast between the United States and England, we have another set of arrangements to consider. England has been from the Reformation until very recent times an essentially aristocratic state. It is still aristocratic in all its traditions and structure, and it is even possible that, despite the growth of the great towns and the present decline of the aristocratic spirit, its degradation into mere plutocracy and the forgetfulness of old relations between the governing and governed, the aristocratic spirit will return. It is not perhaps probable, but it is possible; and at any rate the old aristocratic framework of England is still everywhere apparent.

This historical process is expressed in England by the institution of the Church of England. Establishment and endowment are not the chief marks of this institution, which has not its like in the world. Its chief mark is the way in which this organization is coincident with what was until recently, and still largely is, the governing part of the nation.

No doctrines define the Church of England. Its ministers may and do define doctrine as each wills, save, of course, the anti-national doctrine of papal supremacy. What all agree in is the national function of the establishment.

Official ceremony, great national functions, the villages and country towns from which all England sprang, and which are still the preservers of the English soul, have the Church of England for a medium. More important still, the great "public schools,"

as they are called, wherein the wealthier class is trained in a fashion so sharply different from the education of the mass of the people in the elementary schools-these are almost universally within the organization of the Church of England. The independent, or free Protestant bodies, what are commonly called in England the "Nonconformist bodies," arose in protest against the existence of a state church, not nearly so much in protest against doctrine as in protest against an alliance between the civil state and the church. These great communities were at their origin in conflict with the state church, and later, when the conflict had ceased, were still in a lesser social position; the nation was not officially expressed through their action.

With all this there went a highly concentrated unity of national type, produced by what was, despite domestic differences which loomed very large at home, an essentially united national religion. The English character and ethics were and are everywhere unmistakable, and are the fruit of a common religious experience.

Now, of this arrangement the United States not only bears no trace, but has even no comprehension. Very few indeed are those American citizens who have lived so long in England, or have become in any other fashion so familiar with the English spirit, that they can even recognize the point I am making. Such a thing as a governing class, as the training of that class in special schools, as its connection with the state through a religious organization not of doctrine, but of practice and habit, is not only unknown to the average American, but fairly inconceivable to him. It means a different world. The Free Churches