left free to develop as she pleases her commerce and her manufactures. The Chinese are, as everybody knows, the most enterprising, the most honorable, and the cleverest of merchants. We can safely leave it to them to decide whether they will use junks or steamboats. We no longer would need to choose between Mr. John Hay's policy of the open door, on the other side of which we always found a smiling Japanese, firmly seated, and Mr. Wilson's policy of the open purse, never open to China, but always open to anybody who would assure us that he could never pay.

It has always been as clear as a map that eastern Siberia is the "manifest destiny" of Japan. Similarly, it was clear to people of so diverse minds as Jefferson and Hamilton that the Mississippi Valley was marked out by nature as the manifest destiny of our own United States. Even if we had not found a happy chance for the Louisiana Purchase, no technical titles, no modest colonies like New Orleans and St. Louis, no weapons, and no diplomacy, could ever have kept our people from moving westward. So, also, when our people felt a desire actually to colonize Colorado and California, we could not be kept out by any technical claims in favor of a far-away political powerclaims founded on discovery and military occupation, and not supported by civilization's use.

The time has gone by when bureaucrats, wrapped in red-tape, could sit behind their desks in Petrograd or London and dictate from motives of petty official profit that continental areas shall remain white upon the map, to the perpetuation of the misery of contiguous sweltering millions. Saghalin, an island bigger than two Denmarks, was kept for a convict settlement to please some small official speculator.

It ought to have been Japanese always. Japanese soldiers doubtless secretly occupy it to-day. I hope they do. Under the czar the north half of Saghalin was the worst place on earth. Under the Japanese it will support people of a high civilization and will produce wealth.

We have lately noticed how uneasy

Italy is about the opposite shores of the Adriatic. It is absurd to ask a great modern power like Japan to be contented while the opposite shores of her narrow seas lie empty, waiting to be fortified by some hostile power. It is in the course of nature for the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan to be Japanese lakes.

When swarming multitudes are waiting in Japan to enter on rich, vacant lands, an artificial policy of holding those lands idle in the hope that immigrants from Europe will at some remote period travel five thousand miles, over hundreds of miles of empty land, to settle on the shores of Okhotsk is a policy that cannot prosper.

Unimaginable evils come from the setting up of technical claims against the natural movements of the human race. Natural justice requires a bargain by which all of us intruders shall withdraw our guards and soldiers from China, and let the Japanese into eastern Siberia. Such a bargain can be made attractive to such investors, speculators, and bond-holders as have interests, or think they have, in China or Japan or eastern Siberia. Political objections could be easily handled. It is not unlikely that Japan would gladly give up her dreams of conquest and enter on an entirely new policy of colonization, like that which built up America.

Kamchatka and the southern parts of eastern Siberia are big enough and rich enough to support by themselves a power of the first class.

The Chinese, to save their great inheritance, the eighteen provinces, and their immediate dependencies, would gladly consent to see Japan in permanent possession of all the shores of the Japanese seas and of the lands that abut on those seas.

Even if the czar's title to eastern Siberia were such as to deserve consideration, and even if there was a population in eastern Siberia comparable to the French that were sold to us in the Louisiana Purchase, and even if a transfer of eastern Siberia involved an infraction of political principle, the transfer would be a small offense.

At the cost of temporary annoyance

to a few it would create permanent benefits and security and peace for multitudes, like the numerous small, frequently salutary, crimes, by which we effected the expansion of the United States.

If Mr. Wilson were to commission me to write, for use in schools, a new Machiavelli, the first sentence would be, "Never commit for temporary profit any crime of permanent evil effect." Of two crimes, choose the little one. It is a golden moment to induce France and England to give up their Chinese spheres of influence. Mr. Lansing even says that Mr. Balfour said that England is opposed to spheres of influence.

Negotiations might be slightly embarrassed by the fact that Russian revolutionists in eastern Siberia are now the subject of punitive expeditions by Japanese generals, and that the prestige of America in the far East during the last few weeks has become about equivalent to that of the hairy Aino. It is the duty of rulers to overcome difficulties or circumvent them, and not, at the first hint of opposition, to take cover in the shelter of some great crime.

European dominion of Asian peoples has here and there been beneficent. The French diverted the King of Annam from boiling his wives for lunch, and the English stopped King Thebaw from

roasting his wives in curry; but there is grave doubt as to whether Burma is better off than it was.

In the nineteenth century we called ourselves Caucasians, and talked about the white man's burden, and firmly pretended to believe that everybody would be improved by accepting our rulership. One of the many benefits resulting from the Great War and our great victory is that we have learned modesty. We have learned that we are not able to put our own houses in order, and that most of us are savages without even a veneer of morals. No Frenchman or Englishman any longer pretends that it will be for the benefit of any other human being to be ruled over by him any more than by Sir John Hawkins or Leopold II. If he now plans for conquest and mandatories, he says frankly it is because he needs the money.

In the nineteenth century we devised the partition of China, pretending that it was in the interest of progress. We now doubt whether peace or progress will ever again be our portion. Our highest ambition should be, the highest achievement of our statesmanship would be, to leave eastern Asia as happy as it was before it knew us. Our brightest Oriental dream should be of Japan and China, expanding each into its own vacant spaces, and growing rich as peaceably as the United States and Canada.

OH, but they are beyond all praise," said Cynthia Allonby, enraptured, "and certainly you should have presented them to the queen."

"Her Majesty already possesses a cup of that ware," replied Lord Pevensey. "It was one of her New Year's gifts from Robert Cecil. Hers is, I believe, not quite so fine as either of yours; but, then, they tell me, there is not the like of this pair in England, nor indeed on the hither side of Cataia."

He set the two pieces of Chinese pottery upon the shelves in the south corner of the room. These cups were of that sea-green tint called celadon, with a very wonderful glow and radiance. Such oddities were the last vogue at court in this year of grace 1593, and Cynthia could not but speculate as to what monstrous sum Lord Pevensey had paid for this, his latest gift to her.

Now he turned, smiling, a really superb creature in his blue and gold.

"I had to-day another message from the queen."

"George," Cynthia said, with fond concern, "it frightens me to see you thus foolhardy in tempting alike the queen's anger and the plague."

"Eh, as goes the plague, it spares nine out of ten," he answered lightly. "The queen, I grant you, is another pair of sleeves, for an irritated Tudor spares nobody."

But Cynthia Allonby kept silence and did not exactly smile while she appraised her famous young kinsman. She was flattered by, and a little afraid of, the gay self-confidence which led anybody to take such chances. Two

weeks ago it was that the painted, terrible old queen had named Lord Pevensey to go straightway into France, where, rumor had it, King Henry was preparing to renounce the reformed religion and making his peace with the pope; and for two weeks Pevensey had lingered, on one pretense or another, at his house in London, with the plague creeping about the city like an invisible, incalculable flame, and the queen asking questions at questions at Windsor. Every day Pevensey came to the Marquis of Falmouth's lodging at Deptford, and every day Lord Pevensey pointed out to the marquis's daughter that Pevensey did not intend to go into France, for nobody could foretell how long a stay, as a bachelor. Certainly it was all very flattering.

"Yes, and you would be an excellent match," said Cynthia, aloud, "if that were all. And yet, what must I reasonably expect in marrying, sir, the famous Earl of Pevensey?"

"A great deal of love and petting, my dear. And if there were anything else to which you had a fancy, I would get it for you."

Her glance went to those lovely cups and lingered fondly.

"Yes, dear Master Generosity, if it could be purchased or manufactured, you would get it for me."

"If it exists, I will get it for you," he declared.

"I think that it exists, but I am not learned enough to know what it is. George, if I married you, I would have money and fine clothes and soft hours, and many lackeys to wait on me, and honor from all men. And you would be kind to me, I know, when you re

turned from the day's work at Windsor or Holyrood or the Louvre. But do you not see that I would always be to you only a rather costly luxury, like those cups, which the queen's minister could afford to keep for his hours of leisure?" He answered:

"You are all in all to me. You know it. Oh, very well do you know and abuse your power, you adorable and lovely baggage, who have kept me dancing attendance for a fortnight without ever giving me an honest yes or no. Yet I may no longer shirk the queen's business; no, not even to amuse you, my dear."

"You said you had heard from her— again?"

"I had this morning my orders, under Gloriana's own fair hand, either to depart to-morrow into France or else to come to-morrow to Windsor. I need not say that in the circumstances I consider France the more wholesome."

Now the girl's voice was hurt and wistful.

"So for the thousandth time is it proven the queen's business means more to you than I do. Yes, certainly it is just as I said, George."

He observed, unruffled:

"My dear, I scent unreason. This is a high matter. If the French King compounds with Rome, it means war for Protestant England. Even you must see that."

She replied sadly:

"Yes, even I! Oh, certainly, my Lord, even a half-witted child of seventeen can perceive as much as that."

"I was not speaking of half-witted persons, as I remember. Well, it chances that I am honored by the friendship of our gallant Béarnais, and am supposed to have some claim upon him, thanks to my good fortune last year in saving his life from the assassin Barrière. It chances that I may perhaps become, under Providence, the instrument of preserving my fellowcountrymen from much grief and trumpet-sounding and throat-cutting. stead of pursuing that chance two weeks ago as was my duty, I have dangled at your apron-strings in the vain hope of softening the most variable and hardest heart in the world.

In

Now, clearly, I have not the right to do that any longer."

She admired the ennobled, the slightly rapt look which, she knew, denoted that George Bulmer was doing his duty as he saw it, even in her disappointment.

"No, you have not the right. You are wedded to your statecraft, to your patriotism, to your self-advancement, or christen it what you will. You are wedded, at all events, to your man's business. You have not the time for such trifles as giving a maid that foolish and lovely sort of wooing to which every maid looks forward in her heart of hearts. Indeed, for you to take a wife at all would be a kind of infidelity. Why, do you not see, George, even now, that the woman you marry will always come second to your real love?"

"In my heart, dear sophist, you will always come first. But it is not permitted that any loyal gentleman devote every hour of his life to sighing and making sonnets, and to the general solacing of a maid's loneliness in this dull little Deptford. Nor would you, I am sure, desire me to do so."

"I hardly know what I desire," she told him, ruefully. "But I know that when you talk of your man's busness, I am lonely and chilled and far away from you. And I know that I cannot understand more than half your fine, high notions about duty and patriotism and serving England and so on," the girl declared, and she flung wide her lovely little hands in a despairing gesture. "I admire you, sir, when you talk of England. It makes you handsomer -yes, even handsomer-somehow. But all the while I am remembering that England is just an ordinary island inhabitate by a number of ordinary persons, for the most of whom I have no particular feeling one way or the other."

Pevensey looked at her for a while with queer tenderness. Then he smiled.

"No, I could not quite make you understand, my dear. But, ah, why fuddle that quaint little brain by trying to understand such matters as lie without your realm? For a woman's kingdom is the home, my dear, and her throne is in the heart of her husband."