walls; on a great plain of stones made with hands. with hands. Stone and stone and stone-there is no game to be seen anywhere, and yet they manage to

they then learned of the animals,

air.

"And therefore fathers, taught by their fathers before them, guarded themselves about with all these old rules and customs, which are built upon the experience and knowledge of generations. We know not how nor why, but we obey them that we may be suffered to live in peace. And for all our angakoqs [priests] and their knowledge of hidden things, we yet know so little that we fear everything else. We fear the things we see about us, and the things we know from the stories and myths of our forefathers. Therefore we hold by our customs and observe all the rules of tabu.""

666

Here is the reflection as, quoted by Knud Rasmussen, of the Eskimo woman Anarulunguaq, whom he brought to New York with him and took to the top of a high building: “Ah,' sighed Anarulunguaq, ‘and we used to think Nature was the greatest and most wonderful of all! Yet here we are among mountains and great gulfs and precipices, all made by the work of human hands. Nature is great; Sila, as we call it at home; nature, the world, the universe, all that is Sila; which our wise. men declared they could hold in poise. And I could never believe it; but I see it now. Nature is great; but are not men greater? Those tiny beings we can see down there far below, hurrying this way and

earth like marmots, hang in the air like spiders, fly like the birds and dive under water like the fishes; seemingly masters of all that we struggled against ourselves?

"I see things more than my mind can grasp; and the only way to save oneself from madness is to suppose that we have all died suddenly before we knew, and that this is part of another life.""

Here is a piece of worldly wisdom from a man in whom there were the beginnings of a scientist:

"Dried whale meat and blubber was served, the meat was a trifle mildewed, and when this was commented on apologetically, I answered with a Greenland catchword to the effect that mildew was good for the system. Ularpat's retort stuck in my mind. 'Yes,' he said with a laugh, 'we say the same thing in our country; probably to save the trouble of washing the meat clean. Laziness often makes things "good for you" in that way.'

999

And here is a stroke of literary criticism from a man whom the explorer had asked what a certain story meant:

"H'm, well,' answered Netsit, 'we don't really trouble ourselves so much about the meaning of a story, as long as it is amusing. It is only the white men who must always have reasons and meanings in everything."

The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti. By Felix Frankfurter. Little, Brown & Co.

Further proof that history does repeat itself. What the fear and rage of Massachusetts, hiding behind the law, have tried for six years to do to Sacco and Vanzetti, is what the fear and rage of Massachusetts, hiding behind the law, did to the persons accused of witchcraft in Salem Village in 1692. It is

true that these men have not been executed, but it is also true that the witchcraft frenzy lasted only about six months. The odds are therefore about even. Professor Frankfurter, of the Harvard Law School, has made a careful examination of the case which should be read by everybody who prefers justice to prejudice.

Wilhelm Hohenzollern. By Emil Ludwig. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

A dramatic interpretation, with an abundance of rather journalistic explaining, of the character and deeds of the last of the kaisers. The materials are drawn from authorities close to Wilhelm and generally friendly to him. His enemies could not have served him

worse.

The Rebellious Puritan: Portrait of Mr. Hawthorne. By Lloyd Morris. Harcourt, Brace & Co.

A study of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life, not of his books, written with insight, grace, and charm. Hawthorne, according to this biography, rebelled wisely, but not quite well enough, and finally died of the quietness in which he had taken refuge from the Puritan world.

The Field God and In Abraham's Bosom. By Paul Green. Robert M. McBride & Co. Two strong and tragic plays by a 128

North Carolinian who begins to tread upon the heels of Eugene O'Neill. Andy Brandt's Ark. By Edna Bryner.

E. P. Dutton & Co.

A first novel by a novelist who will justify a good deal of watching. It is the story of a conflict between an enlightened woman and her mean, stupid, crafty family.

Flower Phantoms. By Ronald Fraser. Boni & Liveright.

An exquisite romance of a girl who prefers flowers to men, becomes for a time, in phantasy, a flower herself, and returns to her human condition somewhat more reconciled to her own kind. While the plot is fanciful, the states of mind portrayed are convincing to any acute imagination.

The Story of a Wonder Man: Being the Autobiography of Ring Lardner. Charles Scribner's Sons.

Noble nonsense. Mr. Lardner has two methods by which he makes his nonsense noble: (1) puns; (2) apparent imbecility. The puns are puns. The imbecility is only apparent.

The Second Conning Tower Book. Edited by F. P. A. Macy-Masius.

Verses collected from "The Conning Tower" by the most Horatian editor now editing. Nearly all of the contributors have a silver felicity, but Dorothy Parker frequently inclines to gold. Hawkers and Walkers in Early America. By Richardson Wright. J. B. Lippincott Co. A picturesque record of what went on, chiefly during the first half-century or so of the Republic, upon the highways, and some of the byways, of the United States. Historical novelists should give Mr. Wright three votes of thanks.

influx of Mohammedanism, however, even with all these contacts, the West had made little if any impress on China as a whole. Nestorian Christianity, after a few centuries, disappeared even from the memory of the imperial court; knowledge of its early presence was reacquired only with the discovery of a stone monument near Sianfu in 1625. The Jews gradually dwindled into a small poverty-stricken group in one of the less important provincial capitals, where a semblance of the old religious ritual is still maintained. Mohammedanism never took to China the learning and culture which made it so large a contributor to Western development.

The real impact of Western civilization on China did not begin until well into the nineteenth century. It came even then chiefly because of the development of means of more rapid communication than the world ever before had known: the steamship, the telegraph, and the cable. Oceans and mountain ranges ceased to be barriers. These new aids to communication in fact so reduced the size of the world that Peking, by the end of the nineteenth century, was in reality nearer Philadelphia than Boston was when the Declaration of Independence was signed, and Canton was less far from London than was Aberdeen when Burke thundered in the House of Commons.

By the time, too, that these inventions were so rapidly bringing East and West together, the West had worked its new civilization into fairly coherent form. The tide of democratic polemics was in full flood even though democracy had not yet been completely achieved. Nationalism

of the new and modern sort was getting a strong hold on the minds and emotions of men. The new science and its philosophy, and the Marxian economics, were reorienting the thoughts of men about their place in the universe. Pressed for new markets and new lands by the growth of population and the new industry of the machine, the nations of Europe were seeking new opportunities across the seas.

Thus all things conspired to make of the latter half of the nineteenth century the period in which the West would pour a steadily growing flood of new ideas and methods into the Far East. Good and bad, idealistic self-sacrifice and purely selfish desire for quick profit and special privileges, even though won unscrupulously, were jumbled together in this flood. The flood swept across Japan, and only by heroic effort at remaking their national life did the Japanese save themselves from being swamped. The flood beat against China, and it has slowly been penetrating into even the remotest corners of the land.

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There have been three distinct periods in the reaction of the Chinese to modern Western civilization.

The first period, which lasted roughly somewhat past the middle of the nineteenth century, was marked by an undiscriminating assumption that everything Western was inferior to everything Chinese and, on the whole, undesirable. Western traders might be tolerated, as other barbarians from outside had been, if they did not cause too much trouble and if they recognized their inferiority. Western missionaries

might preach their religion to those who were foolish enough to listen, so long as they made no serious efforts to upset the government. The idea that the West really might have something of value to teach China was, however, absurd. Thus argued those who had occasion to come into contact with the foreigners.

The great mass of the Chinese people, of course, knew nothing and cared less about these strange new barbarians who began to clamor at China's doors. Even the imperial court at Peking took only the vaguest interest in their doings until Western soldiers began to threaten the capital itself. The local officials were left to settle questions which arose in whatever way they chose; and they generally chose the way which at the moment seemed the easiest.

Disagreements, mutual recriminations, the use of force by foreigners to secure Chinese acquiescence in their demands, efforts on the part of the Chinese to pare away the concessions which they had been forced to make, sincere and friendly coöperation in mutually profitable trade -all these are written into the record of the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. On the whole, Western trade was not wanted, nor Western religion.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, a few of the Chinese had begun to take a new attitude. The second period in the relations with the modern West was beginning, a period marked by a growing feeling that China should and must learn from the West. The young men of this period were in many respects as undiscriminating

as their fathers, but in the opposite direction. There was a strong tendency to copy everything Western just because it was Western, and to reject all things Chinese because they were not "modern."

This new attitude showed itself, principally, in two ways.

Chinese troops had been badly defeated in a number of battles by numerically far inferior foreign forces. In 1858 foreign armies forced their way into Peking itself, and the emperor was compelled to sign treaties which recognized as equals the rulers of certain Western states.

In passing, it is worth noting that the significance of this forced recognition of foreign equality can scarcely be overemphasized. The keystone of the Chinese political system was the assumption that the emperor was in theory at least supreme over all the earth; over "all within the four seas," as Confucius put it. Dynasties might be overthrown and new ones established. This, however, meant simply that Heaven's mandate to rule the earth had been taken from one emperor and given to another. Such a change in no way affected the basic assumption that the emperor ruled by what in the West would be called divine right, and that all other rulers of the earth were properly his subordinates or tributary to him. or tributary to him. When Western troops, by forcing recognition of equality between the Son of Heaven and Western rulers, unsettled in its place this keystone assumption of Chinese political thought, they started the downfall of the whole imperial system. The attack on Peking in 1858 was as far-reaching in its conse