loyalty of their magnificent army; to secure the defences of their Empire; to reconstruct the navy; all this will demand money as well as courage. We are indeed glad to welcome among us the patriotic Turks who desire our support. We must be prepared to give them help, financial-and perhaps of another sort-though it must be, as Sir Edward Grey assured the delegates at the House of Commons luncheon, "help without interference.". Above all, we trust the Turks will sternly repress all attempts to revive those feuds amongst their own people that have only lately filled their most ardent sympathizers with horror. For it is these feuds that alienate the sympathy of nations and give the enemies of Turkey-open or secret-the greatest assistance in attacking her.

Mr. E. F. Knight, in his excellent book The Awakening of Turkey, points out that a sharp distinction must be drawn between the governing or Turkish race and those subject Moslem races, Kurd and Circassian, whose fanaticism and cruelty, fostered by a decaying despotism, have been so often held up as typical of Turkish character. The men who first undertook the task of regenerating Turkey are not those who are now reaping the reward. The pioneers of the movement for freedom suffered in exile and in prison for their propaganda. In the drawing-room of the old house of the Binns which shows the initials of its restorer, Thomas Dalyell, who commanded the Royal Army at Worcester in 1651, one met in the fifties and sixties of the last century, Reshid, Fuad, and the gentle yet dauntless Midhat. These men, under the reigns of Sultans Abdul Medjid and Abdul Aziz, laid the "solid foundations of Liberalism in the Turkish Empire." It was not easy to build such an edifice on the soil watered by the blood of so many martyrs, stiff with the prejudice of ages. The rocks

were the intrigues of Bulgar, of Greek, of Serb, of Wallach; the craft and ambition of Armenian; the lust and cruelty of Kurd and Lazi. The Lazis, who inhabit the country between Trebizond and Batum, are often called Circassians. Call them what you will, they are cruel oppressors. And not only the Christian subjects of the Sultan were terrorized by them and the Kurds. Ask the Arabs of Irak-Arabi, of the borders of the Great Nefud, the Syrians of the desert, how they suffered during the despotism of Abdul Hamid's reign. A wave of sympathy from Exeter Hall ran through England in favor of Turkey's Christian enemies. but any stick was good enough to beat the Turkish dog with. The most absurd falsehoods were circulated against the Ottomans in London; so that our old ally of Silistria and Kars suffered perhaps more from our ignorant criticism than from the callous indifference of other Western Powers.

If the task of the Turks be considered seriatim it will be found no small one. Albania, coveted by Austria, remembered by Italy, whose Southern population is intimately associated with the Albanians, is now being pacified by Djavet Pasha's troops. It is in a state of constant ferment. Macedonia is recovering from the throes of internecine feuds and international surveillance. The gathering of harvests will keep the people of the regions of Monastir (Bitolia) and Salonika quiet until the atar gûi and plums and corn are made or carried. About Grevena and Diskata the troublesome Greeks have to be carefully watched, and their relations with their brothers in Salonika and the capital considered. the Adrianople district the tramp of armed men is heard. The necessity for concentration has passed as regards Bulgaria, but the riffraff of Anatolia has been transferred there for surveillance. This, so far, is European Tur

In

key, not too promising a look-out. But the prospect there is pleasing compared with that across the water.

Brussa, connected by rail with Mudania on the Sea of Marmora, is quiet, for there and in Ismid the cultivation of mulberrytrees and cocoons occupies the peasantry. The production of attar of roses is encouraged by the Government, who supply stocks of rose plants to the people. The provinces of Asia Minor are rich in minerals if the mines were worked. In the Smyrna sanjak both gold and silver are found. The turbulent Greeks of the islands are kept in awe by the arrival of Admiral Gambier, for since he came to Turkey the new cruisers can move. They carry convincing arguments in the shape of 6-inch and 4.7-inch guns. The district of Erzinjan and Erzerum is very turbulent, the reactionary elements in the Fourth Army Corps are opposed to the new régime. Of the Lazis in Lazistan next to the Russian frontier, it will be enough to say that they, with the Kurds, filled the saddles of the Hamidian cavalry. In Kurdistan are the devil-worshippers. They dwell in the mountains which feed the Tigris and Euphrates, and make life a burden for those who inhabit Diabekr, Mosul, etc. Syria is full of troubles. It is the playground, or rather the battlefield, of Turks, Arabs, Druses, Maronites, Jews, and Germans. The latter, engaged in agriculture, are orderly and peaceful. In Anatolia the people turn from weaving to warfare, and vice versû. The recent massacres at Adana, forty-two miles by rail from Mersina on the seacoast, are only too fresh in our memories. To amalgamate these various races and creeds is no easy matter. Asiatic Turkey and Arabia have still to be won over to the reform movement. The Young Turks have a heavy task before them. They deserve our sincere sympathy. They are introduc

The Outlook.

ing into Turkey the reforms that the Barons forced on John; that Hampden, Pym, and others wrenched from an unwilling Charles.

But all these troubles are little in comparison with that which the Ottoman Greeks will give to Turkey in the future. It is doubtful whether they will accept army service, and they may send out new bands in Macedonia. They are financed by rich merchants in Constantinople, Salonika, Athens, Liverpool, London, and Brighton. I need not give their names. Even now the Osmanischer Lloyd is putting out its feelers for them. The Young Turks know that whilst Athens' attitude may be formally correct, the cheques from London and Salonika are passing into the hands of the Komitajis. Our Press and public must "gang canny," for our friends the Italians do not see in this affair with our eyes. We must give and take, and establish an agreement. After all, the Cretans, we are told, "are a turbulent race, of proved and proverbial mendacity, bold, independent, and hard to govern." We need not take for gospel truth all their assertions. The Powers made a mistake at Halepa in 1869. The convention signed there made concessions to the Islanders which were not fully carried into effect. We have a reputation for truth in Turkey and in Egypt, let us not lose it in the labyrinth of Greek intrigue. The Cretans are practically independent. Let them beware, lest in pursuing the shadow of Minos' crown they let fall the tangible benefits which the Powers at so much difficulty have procured for them. The nation that holds Crete must possess the command of the Levant. The Romans, Greek Emperors, Saracens, Crusaders, Venetians, and Turks in turn ruled the waves. That is the lesson which the Turks may take to heart in the twentieth century.

Ex-Diplomat.

Old acquaintance is the heart of friendship. We think of some friendships that began before memory began. Other friends we remember making— how and where we met them first, and the impression they made on us. Sometimes the contrast between first impression and the knowledge of years is ludicrous. The mind was on the alert when we met the stranger; it was quick and eager to master his outlook and his ways of thought, to see what he was, and to get his right size; we wanted to know where we were, in short. So it is always with new faces. But, as time goes on, we notice less and less; we see more of the man, we study him less, it would seem. Yet it is this careless intercourse that counts. The mind is off guard, and, so far as it is conscious of it, it is doing nothing. In reality, it is receiving a host of unnoticed impressions, which in the long run may have extraordinary influence.

Cannot many a man point to some long and pleasant, easy-going friendship, a continuous source of interest and ease of mind, which went on without much reflection, till one day he woke up and found himself another man-re-made by another's personality, in the ordinary round of life, in work and play and talk, in talk of books and business, of neighbors and old memories? Slowly one has reached the other's point of view; his life has been learned piece-meal as he tells of its crises, and how he felt at this great moment and that; how he was disappointed at first, but soon came to another mind; how after that he found a great joy, and lived on it for years; and then how it was taken away, but nothing could keep him from living on it still. Stage by stage, by unconscious and freely given sympathy, one has lived the other man's life; one has seen

things and felt them as he saw and felt them; one has slipped unawares into his language, and by degrees into his thoughts. Then comes a great separation, perhaps the friend dies, or duty sends us different ways; the ocean lies between us; one comes back to the old home, and there, alone among one's original friends, among familiar scenes, one finds oneself the strange figure; for the real intimate is across the sea, or beyond the grave. And then with surprise one realizes how close had been the identification with the friend now far away.

The task comes of telling others what has happened to us, and we begin to make trials at biography.

Here's my case; of old I used to love him.

But what was he? What was he not? What are we to say? Most of us break down when it comes to the systematic evolution of a character. If our friends to-day want to know what the great man was of whom they hear so much, they have really to repeat our experience, and gather him up piecemeal. And it is really a wonderful thing how much the mind can absorb in this way, quite unconsciously, how much it can keep, and how well, without effort, it can co-ordinate what it keeps into a general idea.

The next stage is the written biography. But what are we to put into that? Some people have recourse to adjectives, and the result is idle and flavorless. Some confine themselves to the great thoughts and the great labors, till the man is lost in the hero, and not easily distinguishable, perhaps, from an abstract idea. And then a man comes, who is such a fool as not to be able to tell the significant from the insignificant, and he babbles away

in volume after volume about odd and irrelevant things-gestures, orangepeel, paving stones, wigs, lodgings, quips, nonsense, all mixed hopelessly together with things of real momenttill we are not quite sure whether the writer is a total fool or only a partial one, but somehow we read on and reread, and Boswell's Dr. Johnson becomes an intimate of our own.

Now to pass to another region. The greatest change the world has seen was brought about by an intimacy and a biography. "He goeth up into a mountain, and calleth unto him whom he would: and they came unto him. And he ordained twelve, that they should be with him." So runs the oldest account of it in Mark's Gospel. Under the necessity of compression for the sake of working in more material, Matthew and Luke abridge this, and the needless phrase "that they should be with him" is cut away. A quite needless phrase, like many more in Mark, which are also omitted, and yet how essential! The thing is implied by the other writers, but are not the quiet and unobtrusive words worth remembering?

Do they not contain the gist of the whole matter? In epitome what else would the history of Christianity be-of Christianity, that is, so far as it is a real thing, a force and a factor, and not a logomachy or a label?

One thing is worth noting at once. The writers of the first three gospelsprobably all three, certainly two of them had little or no first-hand intercourse with Jesus. They are using other men's reminiscences. This makes it more remarkable how little of the adjective there is in their work-no compliment, no eulogy, no great passages of enconium or commendation. "Why callest thou me good?" So it is recorded that Jesus asked a man once; and it looks as if the mood had passed over into his intimates. They did not "call him good"; they had no

adjectives for him, any more than a man has adjectives for his father or his wife or his child when they mean most to him. The lips may tighten, and say more so than any adjective could achieve. The men who were with Jesus were too full of him for the facile relief of praise. How had it come about?

ness.

These men consorted with him in a life of wandering and often of weariOne vivid incident survives of a day's travel. Once, after the day's march-and that no ordinary one, for it was full of a marked tension, his face was "set"-he and his friends came to a village where they expected to rest. But the messengers whom they had sent on ahead met them with no pleasant news-they would not be received. No one who has not known what it is to be refused bread when hungry and weary will quite guess what it meant. Now it is such moments that show the man, for then he is off his guard. There was nothing to be done but to tramp on; so on they tramped. There were angry looks and hot words-all futile; old stories came back-if one had Elijah's power now, and could call fire from Heaven-"But he turned and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them." After this, the evangelist says simply: "And they went to another village"-a quiet ending, but full of significance. So they lived. "The Son of Man had not where to lay his head." It is such a life, stripped of all padding, that shows the real man.

But many another day's ending is lost to us. What was the talk, as they sat at the night's meal? Was it always intense? Did he never (in our rather foolish phrase) "unbend"? Was he gay or bright-if men can be so without ceasing to be earnest, which some seem to doubt? As they broke bread among

his dry hand up and down: you are he, you are he!" One thing of this

kind survives in the narratives-the fixed gaze and the pause which came when he was going to speak with effect. There are also one or two special words which are quoted as his. There must have been much else as familiar. They must have known him through and through-the inflexions of his voice, his characteristic movements, his step in the darkness, the hang of his clothes, and all such things. Did he speak quickly or slowly? Parables, aphorisms-how dull the set terms sound, when they are labels tied to his words! What proportion have we of all he spoke? And how and when and where did he speak this or that? Was it in a long talk, or suddenly, flashed out with gaze and pause as prelude?

What subjects occupied their leisure? Herods, Roman governors, zealots, Custom House memories, tales of the fishermen's life on the lake, stories of neighbors and of home, what not? What failed to interest him? One cannot picture him as other than deeply read in human experience.

But it is when we reach the heart of the story that imagination fails. The problem is hard. Here are these men, a commonplace, uneducated, and miscellaneous group, dull, as he found and, as he said, at taking in his deepest thoughts, a quite impossible and impracticable regiment for a crusade. And then, a few years later, what do we find? Something has happened to them; they are magnetic with a new power, and draw strong men and wise about them, and foolish men, too, and depraved, it may be, and hopeless

any creature that is human and capable of conceiving that there may be something he does not know. Set down in black and white, what they had to say looked odd and doubtful; some saw at a glance that it was folly. But the spoken word was another thing; the man behind the message gave it a life that went beyond anything that could have been guessed. Elders and scribes and high priests, we read-and it is true of a great many more "took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus."

The problem is to find what made the transformation, and the two passages with the same phrase give the answer clearly enough. They had "been with him"-and the answer grows stranger the more we realize it. It was not what he said, nor exactly how he said it, nor what he did, but the whole effect of Himself. No one will readily understand this who has not had a great intimacy with someone else, with someone of clear mind and kindly heart, richly gifted with the aptitudes that go to make experience and character.

Criticism is the easiest and sorriest trade a beginner can learn in a twinkling. Disraeli spoke of critics as those who have failed; the more drastic sort have never begun. But criticism that is to count must rest on experience; and if the gospels and the movement connected with them are to be criticised, as of course they must be by every intelligent person who is confronted with them, they, too, must be criticised on the basis of knowledge. But here the knowledge, to be of much use, cannot be got from book or books, but it must be gathered, slowly and half-unconsciously, in the original way from an intimacy. Even a political opponent is beyond criticism till one can understand how a human mind can have reached his conclusions and been content with them-till we have iden