merit so as to reach his tao, beyond the good and the evil?

Of course, first of all, mainly, by tearing from his body and heart even the last root of the liana of desire, of love, of regret for his wife; by again and again denying, impugning, destroying the thought of her, though, again and again, it would rise to the nostrils of his remembrance, with a stalely sweet scent like the ghost of dead lotusblossoms.

She was on the shadow side of the forever. Her soul, he would repeat to himself, incessantly, defiantly, belligerently, had leaped the dragon gate. Broken were the fetters that had held him a captive to the tinkle-tinkletinkle of her jeweled ear-rings. A mere picture she was, painted on the screen of eternity, impersonal, immensely aloof, passed from the unrealities of the

earth life to the realities of the further cosmos. He must banish the thought of her, must forget her.

And he did forget her, again and again, with the effort, the pain of forgetting choking his heart.

Sitting by the window, his subconscious mind centered on his tao, his salvation, the blessed destruction of his individual entity, "Reverential and Sedate" huddled in a fold of his loose sleeve, scrutinizing street and sky with unseeing eyes, he would forget her through the long, greasy days, while the reek of Pell Street rose up to the tortured clouds with a mingled aroma of sweat and blood and opium and suffering, while the strident clamor of Pell Street blended with the distant clamor of the Broadway mart.

He would forget her through the long, dim evenings, while the sun died

in a sickly haze of coppery brown, and the moon came up, stabbed on the outer horns of the world, dispassionately calm, sneeringly indifferent to the hearts of man, and the hiving stars swarmed and swirled past the horizon.

He would sit there, silent, motionless, and forget her while the stars died one by one, and the wind came driving the dusk to the east, and the sky flushed with the green of young morning, like a curved slab of thick, opaque jade, and again came the morning and the sun and the reek and the maze and the soot and the clamors of Pell Street.

Forgetting, always forgetting; forgetting his love, forgetting the tiny bound feet of the Plum Blossom, the Lotus Bud, the Crimson Butterfly. Her little, little feet! Ahee! He had made his heart a carpet for her little, little feet.

Forgetting, reaching up to his tao with groping soul; and then again the

thought of his dead wife, again his tao slipping back; again the travail of forgetting, to be forever repeated.

AND so one day he died; and it was Wuh Wang, the little, onyx-eyed, flighty wife of Li Hsü, the hatchetman, who, perhaps, speaking to Tzu Mo, the daughter of Yu Ch'ang, the priest, grasped a fragment of the truth.

"Say, kid," she slurred in the Pell Street jargon, "that there Li PingYeng wot 's kicked the bucket th' other day, well, you know wot them Chinks said-how he was always trying to get next to that-now-tao of his by trying to forget his wife. Well, mebbe he was all wrong. Mebbe his tao was n't forgetting at all. Mebbe it was just his love for her, his always thinking of her, his not forgetting her that was his real tao."

"Mebbe," replied Tzu Mo. "I should worry!"

A

RTICLES galore are being written on Constantinople in these days. Pick up any magazine or newspaper Sunday supplement, and around the picture of Santa Sophia you read of Constantinople, past, present, and future. The general run of text has become as familiar as the illustrations. Domes and minarets, the Golden Horn and ships riding at anchor, slanting tombstones and straight cypress-trees, and tarbooshed Turks walking over the Galata Bridge, accompany the story of Constantine the Great, Mohammed the Conqueror, Abdul-Hamid, and Enver Pasha. You are told that Constantinople is the meeting-place of East and West, the essential link in Germany's Drang nach Osten, and Russia's outlet to the sea. It is the world's emporium, Islam's Rome, Greece's eventual capital, the age-old apple of discord of the European powers. And no writer forgets to remind his readers of what Napoleon said to Alexander at Tilsit.

All of this is excellent. It is an encouraging sign of awakening popular interest in the momentous settlement, not yet decided upon, of the nearEastern problems. The attitude of the American Senate and of American public opinion in the early months of 1920 may be hostile to our post-bellum participation in helping to administer the succession of the Osmanlis, but that is immaterial. We cannot get rid of a responsibility by refusing to see it. Sooner or later we shall have to intervene in the near East, as we had to intervene in Europe; for there will be no peace in Europe until the attribution of

the greatest prize of the war is made. But the greatest prize is at the same time the greatest problem. All the light Americans can get upon Constantinople should be welcome. The focusing of American interest upon Constantinople is a distinct step toward

peace.

Lord Curzon recently declared that the terms of the armistice with Turkey were a mistake. The collapse of the Turks was complete. We should have profited by the demoralization of the autumn and early winter of the year of victory to occupy militarily and to take over the administration of the territories we intended to detach from the Ottoman Empire. None now denies the truth of this statement. In fact, it is not a case of hindsight on the part of those familiar with the near East and with Turkish character to criticize the armistice hastily concluded by a British admiral with the Turks. In every Allied country there was a strong protest at the time, and the subject races of Turkey, especially Greeks and Armenians, instinctively felt that this armistice foreshadowed the destruction of their hopes of freedom.

Unfortunately, the Entente powers were unprepared to take advantage of the victory in the near East. The years of constant fighting on the western front had exhausted their armies, and they were still nervous about the latent powers of resistance of Germany. The military forces already in the near East were not more than sufficient to carry out the particular ambitions of Great Britain and France. The foreign offices of these two powers were not thinking of the general good or of birds in the

bush. Lord Curzon lacked the courage to admit this. Most important of all, the near-Eastern policy decided upon by the Entente in event of victory had been upset in 1917. The readjustment of war aims was left to the peace conference.

President Wilson's Christmas present to the belligerents in 1916 was a note in which the warring nations were asked to state their peace programs. On January 10, 1917, the Entente powers handed to Ambassador Sharp in Paris an explicit reply, in which they openly affirmed the objects they sought by continuing the war. The ninth paragraph of this answer stated textually that the nearEastern policy of the Entente was "the enfranchisement of populations subject to the bloody tyranny of the Turks; the expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, decidedly alien to Western civilization."

When this reply was written, the

Entente powers were acting in harmony. By secret treaties, made in 1915 and 1916, the general lines of the nearEastern settlement had been decided upon. Not only in writing, but also on a map, the Ottoman Empire had been divided into spheres of influence by Great Britain, France, Russia, and Italy. There was no uncertainty in the statement that they intended to expel the Ottoman Empire from Europe. Possession of Constantinople and the guardianship of the Bosporus and Dardanelles had been promised to Russia.1

But two unforeseen events upset this arrangement. The United States entered the war on the side of the Entente, with a program that pronounced definitely against any extension of European eminent domain in the territories to be wrested by American aid from the enemy coalition. In the negotiations for the armistice with Germany, President Wilson's "fourteen points and subsequent

After the first shock of the Russian Revolution, the allies of Russia tried to make themselves believe that the anticzarist movement did not mean a betrayal of the common cause and that the secret treaties would remain in force. Their statesmen welcomed the revolution as the solution of the most embarrassing handicap of the alliance with czardom-the inability to come out openly for the independence of Poland. While M. Kerensky, minister of justice in the new régime, made a categorical statement against the continuation of the czarist policy of conquests, specifying Constantinople as an aspiration an aspiration revolutionary Russia could not sponsor, M. Miliukoff, minister of foreign affairs, declared that Constantinople was as much the dream of new Russia as of old

Russia. Miliukoff was forced out of office. Kerensky in turn, anti-imperialist, but faithful to the alliance, succumbed to the Bolsheviki, who not only formally renounced Russia's share of the Ottoman Empire, but also published in the "Izvestia" the secret treaties and the confidential diplomatic correspondence between Russia and her allies.

Still other complications arose to make difficult any readjustment of the Constantinople and straits question during the rest of the war. The Ukraine, with a population of about 40,000,000 (if frontiers claimed were established), separated from the Russian Empire. If the Ukraine were to become an independent state, her interest in the straits would be greater than that of any other nation. The Entente had to be careful not to play into the hands of Germany in the Ukraine by formulating a new Constantinople policy. And then there was Greece, neutral and semi-hostile when the secret treaties were made, but now an important ally