Let the discussion once be opened, from conscience to conscience, if not from Government to Government, between the two countries, and though I see clearly its dangers, they make me less uneasy than the ambiguities of silence.

There will be unreasonableness and intolerance on both sides, of course; it is in this way that all agreements, all reconciliations begin. For my part, I am making the largest allowance for the Governments; I will grant that at the present time they cannot define the mutual honorable and acceptable concessions that both sides must make to reach an agreement. Every proposition which has not been matured through investigation and the preliminary discussions of public opinion, will be sterile and merely raise the protests of arbitrary minds; but the point concerning which there is no doubt in my eyes is that it is time for the two countries, as well as Alsace-Lorraine herself, to put in motion all their resources of patriotism and reason to solve the problem sensibly and fairly, and not to justify the belief that only socialist levelling can procure for us the remedy which the middle classes have given up as hopeless.

All this is crucial, because on the Alsace-Lorraine problem depend all the other problems, beginning with that of armaments; and these other difficulties may be juggled with for a time, but not suppressed.

Dilatory measures are only temporary expedients. A child will understand that if the Germans and the French do not wish to fight or to ruin themselves, they must and will come to an agreement. A child will also understand that the longer they delay their reconciliation, the more it will cost them. And if, in the general progress of ideas and good sense, Governments alone do not yield to the evidence, so much the worse for them; there will have been no lack of appeals.

Their unproductive expenditures and their resistance to social demands will appear no longer disconcerting, but monstrous. They must render accounts!

What have you done with these thousands of millions which constitute our debt, and whose interest our children will have to pay indefinitely? the people will ask. The Governments will vainly show their armadas of Dreadnoughts filling the ports;

they will vainly show at the same time their submarines, torpedo boats and aeroplanes, which are to annihilate the power of these Dreadnoughts, outmoded and outclassed as soon as they are completed. The outcome is not doubtful; the Governments will be compelled to end where we have asked them to begin; their error will have cost only one hundred and fifty thousand millions of francs in twenty-five years, for Europe alone! One hundred and fifty thousand millions that will have been of no service, and which would have sufficed to transform the world. !

A man of order, first of all, I have tried, with my friends, to warn the Governments, that of France like the rest. Our voices have been drowned by the tumult of the hammers forging steel plates constantly made thicker, and constantly pierced by cannon that ever grow larger. All these plates, under the tempest of popular wrath, will not have the resistance of a sheet of paper that two Heads of States might have signed; but they weigh on mankind none the less as an insupportable burden. The day when rebellion bursts forth, the antagonism of Governments will be nothing in comparison with the real antagonism they will have prepared against themselves, the antagonism between the Governments and the people.

The Governments can still choose between reconciliation and the chasm; they can no longer anticipate popular aspirations, but they can respond to them, and this would be for the Sovereign, the Head of a State, the Minister who should take such an initiative, a glory peerless in history.

It is humiliating to our human dignity that, in the presence of this alternative, there could be hesitation, and that the Governments of the two great countries could not choose between fame and failure.

[A supplementary letter from Baron d'Estournelles de Constant is given here, as it completes the article.-Editor.]

To the Editor of THE FORUM:

DEAR SIR:

I am pleased that you are publishing in THE FORUM my article on "The Remedy for Armed Peace." This article,

indeed, was written with especial reference to European Governments; but we all depend on one another. Already the United States has rendered immense service to the peace of the world and her initiative in this direction, crowned by the last proposition of President Taft, will be perhaps her greatest title to the admiration and gratitude of posterity.

But it must be realized that all the efforts of America in favor of arbitration will only be fully effective when the FrancoGerman reconciliation, through mutual and honorable concessions, acceptable to both sides, shall become an accomplished fact, like the Franco-British reconciliation.

I am convinced that this reconciliation, as necessary to the peace of the whole world as to the prosperity of the two countries concerned, must be the work of public opinion as much, at least, as of the Governments. That is why I am happy that my article will be able to reach, thanks to you, American public opinion, already so enlightened and so passionately devoted to the great new cause of international justice.

It is essential that all should realize the true facts: the victory of arbitration is coming closer, and only the Franco-German situation "stops the way."

(Signed) D'ESTOURNELLES DE CONSTANT.

IS THERE ANYTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN?

EDWIN BJÖRKMAN

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."-Ecclesiastes.

T

HERE is in our own time and generation a growing impatience with the life-conception that makes out of fate

not a stepping-stone under our feet but a millstone around our necks. More and more we are inclined to challenge that sad cry of the Preacher as the final sum and substance of what man may learn concerning life and himself. The moment is drawing nigh, I, for one, believe, when for this truth of the past, which tyrannically interposes itself between us and the future, must be substituted a later and wider and higher truth based on the remarkable advance in knowledge made during the last few centuries. And what is this more recent truth in the last analysis but a recognition-gaining daily in strength and clearness of life as endless change, as a never-ending rebirth on brighter and more far-visioned planes, as an eternal upward climb from darkness to light, from hatred to love, from infuriated slavery to self-surrender in freedom?

"That which is crooked cannot be made straight," declared the Preacher. And the Buddha cried: "Behold, O monks, the holy truth of suffering-birth is suffering, old age is suffering, disease is suffering, and death is suffering."

The Preacher and the Buddha knew nothing but the fact of disease. Its nature was still hidden from them. And for this reason it seemed to them a blow struck at man from withouta castigation that might or might not be deserved, but which could not possibly be avoided. The intimate connection between cause and effect, though dimly felt both by the Sage of Palestine and the Prophet of India, was not yet grasped and mastered by their reasons. In so far as they foresaw the law of causation, it was only in the form which demands that the sins of the fathers be visited on the children unto the third and fourth generations.

As a law bringing good no less than evil, and with equal inevitability, it was wholly foreign to them.

To us of the present day, helped in our vision by the telescope, the microscope, the spectroscope, and a thousand other modern inventions, disease is always the logical effect of ascertainable causes. With the blind awe removed, we are able to realize it as a hint from life of error committed. And in so far as we succeed in revealing the nature of such an error, the disease depending on it will also be rendered avoidable for the future. Thus men have already been led into dreams of a coming day when disease will exist only as a sporadic and quickly checked relapse into past mistakes.

Yes, crookedness is actually being made straight these days. By groping our way from link to link along the endless chain of cause and effect, we are discovering that much which used to be deemed FATAL is little more than ACCIDENTAL. More and more effectively with every passing year, we are also learning that the relationship of cause and effect cannot be pictured as a straight line, but must be thought of rather as a series of widening circles. And we have come to understand how tremendous the force and scope of those spreading rings of effect may prove in comparison with the tiny causal point at their centre. Acting on this new knowledge, we are establishing such subtle and far-reaching connections as those between under-nourishment and crime, between over-feeding and insanity. The surgeon's scalpel has already helped more than one of life's supposedly helpless victims not only to see and hear, but to feel and think straight; while the dietary of the practitioner and the exercises of the physical trainer are turning human rag-heaps into full-brained and fullbrawned men and women.

There is, of course, some crookedness that has its roots struck so deeply in the racial soil that we cannot yet prevail over it. Our means are still as limited as our knowledge, but, like this, they are rapidly expanding. Where the fault committed far back in the centuries has had the chance to eat itself into the very core of some line of descent, there we acknowledge temporary defeat. And with as much kindness as our purpose permits, we propose to eliminate what we cannot set right. The