It is but just, seeing how many books Englishmen write about the United States, that occasionally an American should return the compliment. Nor, if criticism has to be, could we ask for a much fairer or more careful critic than Mr. Collier; and at least he has done us the courtesy to study us in divers aspects and with no little earnestness before he began to write. Certainly he writes "from an American point of view," and certainly also he slips once in a while. We may smile at his "graduates of Eton" and raise our eyebrows when he complains of the "heaviness" of the English breakfast, when we consider how many worthy people there are in the United States who still at their morning meal eat steak, baked beans, and buckwheat cakes-yes, even in conjunction-and how short a time has passed since Mr. Jack London bewailed his inability to get a good honest steak at breakfast time at a certain class of London eating-house. Mr. Collier does not like the Japanese, whom he calls "varnished savages" (but why not "lacquered"?), and he asserts without qualification that "there is no Roman in the English ancestry," a point on which some excellent authorities would be disposed to differ from him, as surely there is no people in the world wherein the Roman type of physiognomy seems so strongly to persist. Of the House of Lords (which he considers "a surer interpreter of the sober wishes of the English people as a whole than the House of Commons") he takes a reasonable and quite unAmerican view; but when he speaks of it as "the most Democratic institution in England," it may be that he has overlooked another institution "England and the English from an American Point of View." By Price Collier. (Duckworth. 7s. 6d. net.)

the Throne; and similarly when he puts the English down as "the most disliked people in the world” it may be that again he overlooks. It was an American of some experience who, speaking of certain Continental peoples, said, "they may not love, but they respect the English; but us they both hate and despise."

This much having been said, it remains that on the whole Mr. Collier judges us fairly and with shrewdness, often running directly counter to accepted American ideas, as when he declares that the English "were not, and are not, a war-loving or quarrelsome race," a truth which many an Englishman, talking to American audiences, has endeavored to drive home without much success, though in truth the American is vastly the more bellicose people of the two. When he pronounces England to be "a man's country" he writes, perhaps, too exclusively from the "American point of view," for while it may be true that the ground plan of society in England is framed with less regard to the requirements and inclinations of the women than is the case in the United States, it is emphatically not so in comparison with most other countries. But in many other matters he shows acquaintance with more than one of the Continental peoples, and when he

akes international comparisons they are rarely to England's disadvantage. Few Englishmen, perhaps, would declare themselves so confident of the virtues of the training which is given to boys at our great public schools. He is more convinced even than French writers of the school of M. Demolins; and it is from the discipline of the playing-field rather than from that of the schoolroom that he believes the chief benefits flow.

The French and German youths are stuffed to the brim with book-learning, while the English lad is in many respects a man. If the three of them go out to the Colonies, we all know what happens. The French boy keeps the books, the German boy attends to the foreign correspondence, and the English boy manages both. A great German manufacturer who has a number of Englishmen as heads of different departments said naïvely, "Somehow these Englishmen seem to get on better with the workpeople."

And it is this governing capacity in the English with which Mr. Collier is chiefly impressed. What is it, he asks again and again, that has made this people the masters of one-fifth of the known surface of the globe and of one in every five of all the known inhabitants thereof? He pays generous tribute to the high qualities of the public service rendered to England by a "class long trained in genuine patriotism, such as no other country can boast of," and recognizes ungrudgingly the breadth of view, the dignity and traditions of restraint which characterize the best English newspapers. The English, he finds, have always put doing before thinking or talking, and he doubts the true divinity of the "general education fetish" as bowed down to in the United States:-"We in America perhaps over-rate the value of education. . . . That a good deal can be done without it the history of England proves." So, repeatedly, in searching for the secret of England's greatness, he comes back to the bringing-up of our youths, and above all to their training in open-air games, dwelling, not without discernment, on the extent to which the old and the young in the English country take their pastimes together-at cricket and in the hunting field, on golf courses and tennis courts-a habit peculiar to the English, and to the operation of which he ascribes not only the early manliness

of English boys but also the late-continuing youthfulness of Englishmen:"We in America are so much older, so much more weary than they are, and it is with some regret that one sees that nowadays England and the English are not as boyish as they were."

For if Mr. Collier sees the qualities which make up England's strength and goes, perhaps, measurably near to tracing them to their proper sources, he is impressed also with what appear to him the elements of weakness and of danger. "Personally I believe we stand at the parting of the ways, and that the student of England and the English is looking on to-day at the first indications of decay of, in many respects, the greatest Empire the

world has ever seen. never sets is setting."

The sun that

Nothing but a tremendous, almost miraculous, wrench can turn our stout, red-cheeked, honest, sport-loving John Bull away from his habits of centuries, to compete with his virile body against the nervous intelligence of a scientific age. His game of settlement on the land, there to raise his crops, there to play, there to live in peace, there to expand himself until he occupies his present large proportion of it, he has played to perfection. But the nations are playing a new game now, and some of them seem to play it more brilliantly, and more successfully, than he does. Though one may praise, and praise honestly, the game he has played, and the manly way, on the whole, he has played it, this need not interfere in the least with the conviction that he is being caught up withwhich means, of course, ere long left behind-in the far more scientific game that Germany, Japan, and America are playing.

It is comforting, then, to find that he can "smile to think what would become of a hundred or two hundred thousand Germans landed on these shores. They would be swal

lowed up or dispersed like chaff." And he is glad to think that they would be.

As between men, we all know that America does not like England and that Americans do not like the English, but no intelligent American, no American indeed whose opinion is worth a fig, would rejoice to see this nation, which has taught the nations of the world the greatest lesson since Christianity, and that is the lesson of law and order and liberty, lose her grip. We, too, are of the Saxon breed, diluted though the blood may be, and we have our problems and our tasks, and both would be made harder should English civilization prove a failure.

He would not, nor, he thinks, would most of his countrymen, "like to see the old man downed," and he looks hopefully to three "contingencies which may avert the present trend of things," which three are (1) The ultimate, inherent steadiness of the English people; (2) Imperial federation; and (3) war with Germany, war at once before the enemy grows too big. He places the three in the inverse order, however, putting war with GerThe Times.

many first:-"And there would be few tears shed in any capital in Christendom were they (the Germans) chastened." But here we tread on slippery ground. Enough has been said to show that Mr. Collier is not a superficial critic. He is an American, and at times he talks like a commonplace American of the cocksure type with which we are all too familiar; but more often he talks like a scholar and a man who thinks. If now and again, as in discussing differences in the American and English tongues, or when prattling of London society, he flounders for a minute in banalities; it is to sink at worst no deeper than his boot-tops, and he is soon out on dry land again, striding vigorously. his heel falls overhard on our corns at times, it is for us to remember that it would not hurt if our feet were sound and corns not there. Not many Englishmen could write as much of England and find, on the whole, so little il to say of her or say it with less bitterness.

If

In the correspondence which has lately appeared in the Spectator on the subject of the call of the cuckoo, a writer signing himself "L. E. C.," makes a remark which is certainly correct as regards most attempts to set down the notes of birds' songs on paper. He gives instances of three triple calls which he has noticed as distinct from the cuckoo's ordinary double call, but he adds that the intervals which he describes are by no means invariably true. Every one will agree who has tried to perform that very delicate and difficult thing,-to write down a bird's song as he hears it. It is not one difficulty, but three or four. There is the difficulty, to begin with, of hearing correctly; it is not everybody who has the ear to carry in his head, or even to reproduce by whis

If

tling, the sounds which he hears. he can carry the sounds in his head, he must either be a sufficiently skilled musician to know what the notes and intervals are which he has heard, or he must go to a piano or some other instrument to find out the notes and write them down. Then, as regards the piano, he will find not only that the tone and quality of the notes are not the same as the bird's, which is natural enough seeing that the bird sings or pipes, and the piano's sound is wire struck by a hammer; but also, the notes which he hears often do not correspond with the notes of our scale; they are slightly flat or slightly sharp, and the intervals are just as often different. Perhaps the nearest way, though it is not easy, to come to the actual notes as they are heard is the

method which Mr. J. E. Harting describes in his "Birds of Middlesex." He used to have a short wooden pipe, made with two or three stops, which could be shortened or lengthened at will. By this means, he tells us, he could imitate the call of many birds on his one whistle, and he found it very useful when he wished to decoy birds near him. But there must be a talent in finding such a pipe or getting it made; probably others have tried pipes following Mr. Harting's plan, and have succeeded only in obtaining dismal squeaks unlike any sound made by any bird whatever.

One of the easiest of bird-calls to imitate is the curlew's; perhaps, indeed, it is the easiest of all; almost any one with a little practice can get it fairly accurately, though it takes more than a little practice to be able to whistle one of those wild birds down from his flight over moorland water to circle within a few yards of the call. But how many people who can call a curlew could be certain, when out of hearing of the bird, of pitching on the right note to begin with, or of whistling the right interval? Of course the curlew's note varies in pitch and in interval, but Mr. Harting gives it as G sharp to C, and no doubt that is right as the central, usual pitch and interval. It sounds perfectly absurd on the piano; so does another cry, the green plover's, which Mr. Harting makes out to be a minim on B sliding off to a quaver on B flat and then a crotchet on the E above,-the third ledger line. But if you try to whistle those notes, you begin to hear the right call. Another queer sequence on the piano is the yellowhammer's monotonous little run; it runs seven quavers on D and then jumps to two crotchets, F, E. Would most people, who know the sound of the yellowhammer's song very well indeed, pitch on D as the note on which he begins?

Or take another sequence of notes; it is the sequence by which Mr. J. V. Stewart in his "Birds of Donegal" describes the delicate little cadences of the willow-wren, that singing ripple down the scale which rings from the breaking buds of May. "Its song, if it deserves that name, consists of ten whistling notes; the latter are very soft and run into one another." He gives the notes as descending from E ten notes down to C, in the key of C; but how many who have heard the willowwren would describe the cadence as being so regular as that? It is a pity that so few attempts have been made to get a representative collection of English birds' songs and phrases jotted down on paper. A comparison between a dozen or so of such collections would be one of the most interesting studies possible; and it would not only be the comparison of the pitch and interval chosen by the different writers which would be interesting, but a comparison of the phrasings which they took down from the every-day song of such varying and individual singers as blackbirds. Blackbirds invent phrases for themselves. The writer six years ago, in a boat on a Sussex pond, heard a blackbird morning after morning sing the same sequence of notes, a most original piece of music which he has remembered ever since. He has never heard any blackbird sing it elsewhere; but this year on a morning in June, on that same pond, from the same part of the wood above it, he heard the same sequence. It may have been the same bird, for blackbirds are very local and attached to the same spot, as you may prove by watching a pied blackbird, or one in any way easily distinguished, year after year. Or if it was not the same bird that sung the old sequence, it may have been a descendant.

Some of the birds' calls have been taken down in their names. Cuckoo is one of the obvious call-names, though