TH The Foreign Loans By H. V. CANN HERE might have been no war if European governments and diplomats could have foreseen how great and permanent would be the material gains in America from the waste in Europe. The new conditions have transferred across the Atlantic an enormous amount of wealth, and rapidly created in the United States enough surplus capital to place its bankers in the forefront of the world's international money-lenders. Since the autumn of 1914 loans aggregating nearly seventeen hundred million dollars have been negotiated here by European governments, syndicates of bankers, Latin-American countries, the Dominion of Canada, and a number of its provinces and municipalities. These loans were made in various forms; on secured and unsecured bonds, special credits, and short-term notes. A few were current less than one year, but the usual terms were from one to five years, excepting several issues of municipal bonds. The largest debtor is the United Kingdom, with France a close second, followed, in the order of indebtedness, by Canada, Russia, Argentina, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Yucatan, Norway, Greece, Chile, Sweden, Panama, Bolivia, and Uruguay. A broad public market for foreign securities has not yet developed here, but a certain volume of trading is carried on, and prices of the leading issues are published daily. It is probable that in time. the flotation of foreign loans will become a matter of course, and then underwriters will reach a larger market among private investors. Great blocks of Anglo-French bonds were taken by two industrial corporations engaged in the manufacture of war-supplies. One of these companies originated an able policy by distributing the bonds to shareholders in lieu of cash dividends. Probably not more than two thirds of In nearly every case where loans were the assurance with a smile. What! Louis! so simple, kindly, natural; so all-round a good fellow; so like all the rest of us, only nicer! And I am quite sure that in his inmost heart at this period he could never really have looked forward to or expected the fame which later came to him, and which grows and expands as time gives us the perspective wherewith to view it in all its roundness and bigness and essential simplicity. In fact, in introducing himself to me, he remarked simply that he was "a writer-chap," or hoped to be one. I was told of another rainy afternoon "blague party," at which I did not chance to be present, during which Bob Stevenson amused himself by forecasting the future careers of those present. When he came to his cousin he remarked with a satirical little smile: "There sits Louis, as smug and complacent as any old type de bourgeois. I have not the least doubt that he fondly imagines that one of these days. they will be publishing all of his dinky, private correspondence-'the letters of R. L. S.'-in boards." And Louis joined as heartily as any one in the laugh which the sally raised. Bob, at least, did live to see the publication of the "Vailima Letters," and I have often wondered if he remembered this little incident as he thumbed their leaves. But I would not give the impression. that the artist colony of Grez during that memorable summer was wholly masculine in its make-up, for this was far indeed from being the case, and most of the unforgetable dramatic quality of the place. and the time would have been lacking but for the presence of a very fair proportion of the female element. There was a certain return to primitive standards in the relation between the sexes, but primitive standards, nevertheless, in which honor and a regard for the square deal held a high place. In matters of morals Stevenson himself was the least censorious of judges, providing there was no infringement of the law of nature or the law of friendship; though perhaps it would be truer to say that he entered no judgment either for or against the accused, pre- But if he heard of anything mean or I would not, however, by any means belonged to the quattrocento rather than to the end of the nineteenth century. Had she been born a Medici, she would have held rank as one of the remarkable women of all time. That she was a woman of intellectual attainments is proved by the fact that she was already a magazine writer of recognized ability, and that at the moment when Stevenson first came into her life she was making a living for herself and her two children with her pen. But this, after all, is a more or less ordinary accomplishment, and Mrs. Osbourne was in no sense ordinary. Indeed, she was gifted with a mysterious sort of over-intelligence which is almost impossible to describe, but which impressed itself upon every one who came within the radius of her influence. Napoleon had much of this; likewise his arch-enemy the great Duke of Wellington; and among women Catharine of Russia and perhaps Elizabeth of England. She was therefore both physically and mentally the very antithesis of the gay, hilarious, open-minded, and open-hearted Stevenson, and for that very reason, perhaps, the woman in all the world best fitted to be his life-comrade and helpmate. At any rate, we may well ask ourselves if anywhere else he would have found the kind of understanding and devotion which she gave him from the day of their first meeting at Grez until the day of his death. in far-away Samoa; if anywhere else there was a woman of equal attainments who would willingly, nay, gladly, throw aside all of the pleasures and comforts of civilization to live among savages, and the still rougher whites of the South Pacific, in order that her husband might have just a little more oxygen for his failing lungs, a little more chance for a respite and an extension of his shortening years? Probably no one ever better deserved than she the noble tribute of verse which her husband gave her, and from which I have quoted the opening line. Both she and her daughter Isobel had been studying art in Paris through the winter, and had joined the regular AngloSaxon migration to Grez in the early sum mer. The latter, then a bewitching girl The last time that I ever saw Stevenson It was only at the very earliest peep of Instantly there was pandemonium in that attic, and a pillow-fight of unusual proportions immediately developed. As is usual on such occasions, sides were soon formed, and one side quickly demonstrated its superiority over the other, the defeated party being driven gradually down three flights of stairs, and up the village street from end to end. Finally, overcome with laughter and with the unwontedly early exercise, the combatants called a truce, and returned amicably to their night's quarters in search of more ample raiment, for the early morning air from the forest was chill, and nightgowns and pajamas afforded but meager protection. Having clothed ourselves at leisure we strolled across the street to the common salle à manger for the matutinal rolls and coffee. The first man whom I met in the courtyard was Stevenson, who, I thought, looked rather hollow-eyed and weary. It appeared that he and Mrs. Stevenson had passed the night in the chamber directly beneath the one occupied by our hilarious band. The early morning bombardment to which they had been subjected can therefore be readily imagined. "I had forgotten, Harrison," he said, with a wan smile, "that we were ever such reptiles." With the unfailing instinct of the true artist Stevenson made a mental note of this incident, and he used it later in one of the most interesting chapters of "The Wrecker." The duration of the Stevensons' stay in France during this, their last visit to the Old World, was comparatively short, and before many weeks they had returned once more to San Francisco, and thence to the South Seas and Samoa. Some years later chance sent me also to the South Pacific, but several attempts to arrange a meeting were unsuccessful. The Fates were against me, and I never saw Stevenson again. I Nothing but Uppers To-night By FREDERICK LEWIS ALLEN REVEL in sleeping-cars. I like to think of the original Mr. Pullman, or whoever it was whose mind first conceived the modern sleeping-car, as a philanthropist, a missionary who had a vision of the joy of life, and labored to bring it into our prosy existence. He looked upon his fellow-men, and found them civilized. Because some savage, gloriously dirty, had had the temerity to take a bath and had relished the sensation of cleanliness, cleanliness had become a convention of our century. Because another savage, a little later, had encircled his neck with a starched collar and had enjoyed the esteem which this invention drew from the collarless plebeians, he found the people of our enlightened age slaves to collars and all that collars stand for. Now, he knew in his heart that his friend Jones would once in a while like to dispense with shaving, let his hair grow, and march to his office, unbathed, in his pajamas. Instead of satisfying this human craving for change in such a pleasantly normal way, Jones waited for his two-weeks' vacation, and then hied himself to the woods, where, with fishing or hunting or communion with nature as a pretext, he could be dirty and uncivilized to his heart's content. But vacations, reasoned Mr. Pullman, are fleeting. And then he slapped his thigh and cried, "Eureka! "I shall conventionalize discomfort," he said. "Everybody has to travel by night sometimes; Jones often does. I shall de vise a form of travel utterly uncomfortable and barbarian. I shall invent a car in which there are no beds, but shelves reached only by a step-ladder or gymnastics. In it there shall be a wash-room in which washing is a difficult adventure and shaving a gamble with death. I shall man it with porters who leave the lights on and waken one at the wrong stations; I shall have the whole car in constant vibration, and shaken up like a medicinebottle once every hour; sleep will thus become as impossible as it is to the camperout on his bed of pointed balsam-twigs. When the traveler arrives at his destination he will feel as if he had n't slept or washed or consorted with the civilized for a fortnight. He will sing in his bath once more, and put on his starched collar with a thankful heart." So Mr. Pullman drew his plans; and he looked upon the car of his making, and it was uncomfortable. Those who travel in sleeping-cars may be divided into two classes: people with foresight and people without it. The former engage their accommodations two days in advance and are assigned lower berths, which have, for those resigned to wakefulness, a view. Members of this class tell me that to raise one's head from the pillow and see the moonlit country fly by, or to pass a train-yard and see the locomotives tossing their plumes of steam against the blackness of the sky, or to follow the progress of the dawn in an endlessly varying motion-picture, is a joy so 1 |