Europe becomes the centre of democracy and coöperation. The effect in Germany is already becoming apparent.

II

To the peoples of Austria-Hungary, this war has seemed throughout a war of defense against Russian imperialism. They embarked light-heartedly enough on the adventure of 'punishing' Serbia, but the intervention of Russia put a very sombre complexion on affairs. The government was not long in sharing the discovery that Austria-Hungary had nothing to gain and everything to lose by a general European war; and since then they have continued to fight simply in order to avoid destruction. Consequently the Russian Revolution has removed the whole raison d'être of the war for the Dual Monarchy. This has been made abundantly evident by the energetic activities of the new Emperor and his ministers toward internal reform, and the explicit repudiation of annexations and indemnities. The lack of a federal constitution and the unwillingness to cede the Trentino to Italy seem to be the two obstacles between Austria-Hungary and peace, and it is possible that they might be surmounted if the issue were put squarely.

III

Bulgaria entered the camp of the Central Powers reluctantly, deliberately accepting the bird in the hand after patient and vain waiting for the two in the bush. Her aims were perfectly definite. She wished to unite under her flag the territories inhabited by her nationals and allotted to her in February, 1912, by the treaty with Serbia, namely, the so-called uncontested zone in Northeast Macedonia, which was taken by Serbia in the Second Balkan War; the great trade-route

down the Struma Valley debouching at Kavala, taken by the Greeks, and the Southern Dobrudja, taken by the Roumanians, in the same war. In addition, the imponderabilia weighing for her decision were her dislike of Russian imperialism and her dread of Russia at Constantinople. Germany could offer her additional territory, but at the price of the eternal enmity of her neighbors and practical loss of independence. The Allies could offer her freedom and coöperation, but could not satisfy Bulgaria's national aspirations, owing to the reluctance of Serbia, Roumania, and Greece to yield the necessary territory, in spite of the compensations offered elsewhere. The Revolution has removed the fear of Russian imperialism, and has set up a military situation which makes it extremely difficult to deprive Bulgaria of territory to which she clings, or to realize the wider aspirations of the Serbs and Roumanians. Lastly, the mere course of the war, with all that it entails, has brought all the Balkan nations to a more conciliatory frame of mind.

It is, then, evident that the Russian Revolution almost closes the door on the physical solution of the problem of Central Europe, but only to open an intrinsically more attractive diplomatic vista. Central Europe can hardly be broken up, but it may be dissolved. Hitherto Austria-Hungary has cleaved to Germany because she preferred the Kaiser's categorical imperative to vivisection by the Tsar. Now she is faced on one side by a league of democratic nations which between them control the economic and political future of the world, and on the other by the prospect of being a minor partner in an impoverished and highly unpopular Central Europe, an institution with a shadowy present and a very problematical future. In these circumstances it is not unlikely that the Allies might tempt her

by the offer of peace, coöperation, and freedom of commerce, in exchange for the cession of the Trentino to Italy and equity to the nationalities.

Bulgaria also seems to feel that she has no future in the war, or with the Central Powers, and nothing to fear from Russia. As a matter of fact, she came to this decision as far back as August, 1916, but her advances were then rejected. Subsequent events have strengthened her motive1 and inclined the Allies to listen to her.

The advantages of meeting the Aus/trian and Bulgarian desire for peace are obvious. Pressure would be brought to bear on German opinion in the direction of moderation; Germany's route to the East would be broken; Turkey would be isolated, and the military situation at Saloniki would be eased.

The difficulties are equally obvious, and perhaps the chief is that of fair treatment of our Balkan Allies. But it seems probable that the disasters and calamities to which they have been subjected will have led Serbia, Roumania, and Greece to take a more accommodating view of the situation, and to realize, in the light of the Russian Revolution, how immensely difficult it would be to achieve the plenitude of their desires. Consequently some such arrangement as the following might satisfy all parties:

(a) The Austro-Hungarian frontiers to be recognized, the claims of the nationalities in the Empire being met by internal reforms.

(b) Bulgaria's former frontiers to be restored, and in addition her claims recognized to the so-called uncontested zone, to the Bulgarian portion of

1 For example, as a symptom of Bulgarian feeling, vide the anti-German riots at Sofia last April, and the Serbian Press Bureau's report that the Bulgarian Premier, M. Radoslavoff, is 'creeping round' toward friendly talk with Russia. -THE AUTHOR.

the recent Greek acquisitions in Macedonia, and to the part of the Dobrudja taken from her in 1913 by Roumania. (c) Serbia to be compensated by fusion with Montenegro, thus gaining an outlet to the sea at Antivari. This outlet could be made satisfactory by the purchase of Spizza from Austria. (d) Saloniki to be internationalized. (e) Roumania to be restored and her countrymen in Transylvania to be granted autonomy.

In this discussion America has purposely been left to the last, as, in the execution of any such policy as this with Austria and Bulgaria, the United States would play the chief part. It must not be forgotten that comparatively good feeling still exists between Austrian diplomacy and that of America; and with regard to Bulgaria, the following important factors must be borne in mind. First, Bulgarians look upon America as their educational creator, and the entry of America into the war on the side of the Entente has been one of the most powerful new influences at work in Bulgaria. Second, practical expression has been given to this feeling by Bulgaria's refusal to break off diplomatic relations with the United States.

There is the further consideration that the American people can approach this matter disinterestedly and with open minds, not clogged by past traditions or hampered by old associations. It is far easier to formulate a policy where none existed before, than it is to change drastically a policy already formulated and pursued for some time.

The American people enjoy in this matter a position of advantage, they have at hand the necessary diplomatic machinery, and they can grapple with this problem with unfettered energy and unclouded brains. May they succeed where others have failed!

I

STUDENTS of prehistoric man, limited in their material for study by the difficulties of persistence through a few hundred thousand years of the bodies, or parts of bodies, of our Glacial Era forbears, are compelled to give large consideration to the make-up of the lower jaw of these early men, because jaws seem to persist where arms and legs and ribs do not. The testimony of the lower jaw, coupled with that of the brain-case, for the top of the head is also fortunately resistant to the ravages of time, is the basis of many of our conjectures as, to the physical nature of our prehistoric ancestors and their probable mentality, disposition, and family life.

We take these jaw-based conjectures seriously, even calling them scientific knowledge, because we have built up a fairly reliable science of anthropologic correlations on a basis of the comparative study of the various physical parts, mental endowments, and temperamental peculiarities of many different kinds of men- and anthropoids, or near-men- of the present time. A skull, or a jaw, or even only a tooth or two, seem to be all that the anthropologist requires for a very interesting disquisition on the physical, mental, and moral make-up of an otherwise entirely absent and long passed dinosaur, cave-bear, or extra-early gentleman of France. The anthropologist has learned to be confident that, with such a given type of skull, or shape of

jaw, or form of tooth, a great many other things inevitably go.

That correlations among other parts of organisms are real, there is no question. I once followed Luther Burbank about both of us on hands and knees-in a small bed of hybrid plum seedlings, while he indicated what particular seedlings were almost certainly going to produce especially worthwhile new kinds of plums, just because they already showed certain particular varying kinds of stems and leaves, although these plant babies had not as yet, to my eyes, even begun to dream of producing plums at all. But Mr. Burbank knows plant-correlations, and makes winning bets on them.

So, when one sees a photographic reproduction of Herbert Hoover's face and head, and notes the marked type of brain-case and lower jaw presented by it, one can confidently make a beginning in understanding this newly arisen American personality, who tells us so insistently what and what not to eat, and so incisively why and why not.

But, unfortunately, most of us, not being trained students of anthropologic correlations, have got to stop and be content with this beginning. We may add to it some understanding by cogitating things that we have heard about him, press anecdotes of doubtful authenticity that we have read, and descriptions of him that we have heard from the few who have seen him. But to most of us he is, and will long remain, as a personality, just a myth, or at most a man whose likeness reveals

an encouraging brain-case and jaw. And this despite a real desire to know more. For to how many people in Belgium, England, and America has something starting from this man come as a reality, a reality of help, a reality of authority, but come only from a hidden centre, as a searching radius stretched out to them and touching their most intimate affairs and feelings! Few persons know Mr. Hoover by sight or hearing, fewer still by hand-clasp, or eye to eye. To all but these few he is almost mythical as a human being, however real he may be as an official name and quoted oracle.

The few who do know him personally, as human being, man of marked traits, unpretentious but most impressive manner, and curiously potent appeal and attractiveness, curiously, because not produced in any usual and familiar way, least of all in any intended way, the few who have this personal knowledge of him enjoy a most interesting and suggestive experience. He becomes a friend and an object of study at the same moment; he discovers himself to be at once a thoroughly individualized man and yet a most revealing type of a class. His most personal and special characteristics do not prevent him from being a generalized and most representative and illuminating example of a certain kind of man, increasing in numbers and importance in every civilized land, but appearing especially rapidly and well-developed in America.

That Hoover has lived a third of his life in London makes neither him nor the essential features of that life anything but simon-pure American; his home, his office, his family, and himself, were as vividly American throughout those days in London City and the West End as they are to-day in Washington. So he represents his type as an American example of it, with all the

national characteristics obvious, but never so exaggerated as to obscure the more fundamental type characters.

A study of Hoover's personality, then, not only has the recommendation of satisfying natural curiosity concerning a swiftly risen world-figure, but it should also reveal to us something of the character of our political and social evolution; for any knowledge of the characteristics of the class to which we are turning more and more for our national leaders, will enable us to obtain some indication and understanding as to whither and how we are moving along the path of changing social organization.

II

The biographical details of Herbert Hoover's earlier years will not go far in explaining to us his present personality. Born in 1874 on an Iowa farm, of Quaker father and mother, he received through them that native endowment of potentialities which come, variously, to each of us by the processes of heredity; processes still mysterious despite all the wealth of detail of mechanism and method which modern, post-Mendelian study of heredity has revealed. We do know something of why a man's eyes are blue, if they are blue instead of brown, as another man's eyes are; and something of why he is mentally defective from birth, if he is, while another is so mentally sound.

But despite the cheerful confidence of those too optimistic specialists who say that the secret of inheritance is now known, and that, being given a full knowledge of one's ancestors and collaterals to the number of several dozen, they will prophesy the physical and mental make-up of one's next child, the fact is that they cannot. They cannot, if for no other reason than that human births are too few per family to give them the advantage of the work

ing of the Mendelian mathematical formulæ on which their prophesying is based. Besides, they can rarely have that full knowledge of ancestry which they need. Mr. Hoover does not know, nor do I, the full history of his ancestors and collaterals, and the mere knowledge of the make-up of one's parents and of a few grand- and great-grandparents, is never sufficient to explain why any one's inherited characteristics are just what they are.

The influence of one's environment is sometimes more nearly determinable. But there is one great difficulty about that, too, and that is, that to understand fully the effect of environmental influence requires a pretty good understanding of the native qualities of the material upon which the environment acts. The reaction of differently formed human beings is never exactly the same even when the environmental action on them is nearly identical. 'You can't,' as David Starr Jordan is wont to say, to explain some failures of college endeavor, 'put a thousand-dollar education into a fifty-dollar boy.'

Herbert Hoover's early environment was affected by the death of both parents while he was a child and his being handed over to the sympathetic care of various aunts and uncles, all of the Quaker faith and training. This condition must have placed in his own hands earlier than is usual with most of us, a certain personal share in the determination of his own environment. For example, when the time for his preparation for college came, he found himself on the Pacific coast under the care of a Quaker uncle, who had naturally planned that this preparation should lead him into a Quaker college. But already the youth had decided that his higher education should be obtained in a modern scientific university. This was a decision determined partly by the lack of control of the environment

itself, but more probably by the assertion of an inherited quality which made strongly for self-determination of behavior. He went, therefore, to Portland, and, supporting himself by his own exertions, was able in a couple of years to fit himself for his 'modern scientific university.' He entered Stanford University with the first opening of its doors in the fall of 1891, and thus entered on a characteristically pioneering career with Stanford's pioneer class of 1895. During his four years at the university he again supported himself by his own exertions.

Now, without doubt, these six years of earning his own way as a youth of fifteen to twenty-one years were an environmental influence which had its real effect, and one probably recognizable and of much importance to-day in its results. He learned early something enduring about values in human life; about things that count and things that are superficial. And he learned something of his own capacities, and to have confidence in them. One of his present outstanding characteristics is confidence, although a confidence never weakened by conceit.

His major work in the university was in the department of geology and mining, under the supervision of a sturdy, direct, natural teacher and investigator, John Casper Branner, a scholar of practical mind, intent on truth and essentials. This association was good environment for the rapidly developing young man, already inclined by native instinct and boy's experience to be intent on the same things.

Dr. Branner's advice to the students graduating from his department-to be miners for a while before being 'mining engineers'—was followed quite literally by Hoover, who went into a Sierran mining-camp and was there miner and shift-boss, and perhaps other things, before he turned again to mining engi