veloped the British capacity to raise troops and carry them overseas; 450,000 men were enlisted, partly from the loyal colonies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Another tremendous step was taken by the two sovereigns, King Edward and King Premier, when, after the success of Japan over Russia in the Asiatic war of 1905, Great Britain formed an alliance with Japan as to Asiatic affairs. France, the British ally, had great possessions on that coast, and Germany, not the ally, had inserted the end of a wedge by seizing Kiaochau. Japan was no part of the Triple Entente, but each member of that combine favored and cultivated the new Asiatic Power.

George the Fifth. The Guelphs all have a family physiognomy-full blue, somewhat staring eyes, round faces, German ensemble. The death of Edward in 1909 brought to the throne his son, a man of forty-four years, who had never had much contact with public affairs, and possessed almost none of his father's qualities of statecraft. He was a man

of character, and set out to reign scrupulously in accordance with the precedents set forth in Hansard's" Parliamentary Debates."

The trouble with royalty in any form is that good intentions with a determination to do one's best-which may make a tolerable governor of one of our States-does not exactly fill the bill for a sovereign in modern Europe. Cousin George could not so much as stick out his tongue at Parliament, while Cousin William was a live wire-bullying the Reichstag, addressing his people, appealing to a theology which upholds the Germans in the style of the old-fashioned prayer: "O Lord, bless me and my wife; my son John and his wife; us four, no more, Amen.". v

The English people indulge themselves in the gossipy small talk which is dear to the subjects of the English monarchy. One set tells you that the King grows more and more popular every day; that his grace and good sense and carefully moderated influence over English statesmen make him a power in the realm. Another set, equally ill informed, assure you that he only puts things in a mess, and undoes the work of his father. The weight of evidence is that King George is a man who possesses the British virtues of sense and steadfastness. In the correspondence between the Courts in the crisis of July, 1914, we find personal telegrams to Cousin William; but nobody for a moment supposes that they contained a syllable which had not

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been read and approved by Asquith, the King Premier, the responsible head of the British Government. Everybody knows that no personal desire of the King for war or against war deflected the decisions of the British Cabinet. George V cannot take the field in command, as did the great William of Orange in 1689. He cannot construct a majority in the House of Commons, as did George the Third, and thus keep alive a war which might be repugnant to the people of the realm. The only ambition which he can cherish is to hand down his crown untarnished; and the war somewhat endangers that modest hope.

The Guelphs and Their People in War. The war is for England a renewed test of the possibility of successfully confronting an Imperial army with Parliamentary armies. Can the British raise as many men as their enemies? It is clear that a popular government may be cap-a-pie for war, for France has put into the field as large a proportion of her population as Germany. But forty millions of French cannot hold sixty-eight millions of Germans. Will the additional forty-six millions of Great Britain turn the scale ? Can England raise as many men as France? Will the men be as efficient as the Germans? Can a Parliament, through Ministers requiring votes of confidence, carry on a war against a centralized monarchy ?

In this crisis King George is forced to be only a first-class passenger on a troop train. It is King Premier and his associates who make the sudden decisions, who appeal to the nation, who propose grants and loans, who designate the generals, decide on the use to be made of troops, call up new levies. King Premier, however, must take the advice of military experts, and at the same time must take the responsibility for any trouble or misjudgment.

Can a great republic fight efficiently? The United States of America has never done so. In this contest one of our principal duties is to note the difficulties and results of war carried on through a popular assembly. We must learn how to gain the efficiency which was so painfully lacking in the Revolution, War of 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, and Spanish War. King Premier fought Napoleon, rescued India in 1857, has won many Asiatic and African campaigns. Can he meet this crisis? Could we meet a like crisis?

There is no lack of English patriotism and

the men are abundant; but Great Britain is obsessed by a fear lest the empire of the air may be lost while the empire of the seas is held. When Blücher visited London after Waterloo, his instructive remark was: "My God! what a city to sack !" Could that city stand the strain of a rain of bombs from a fleet of Zeppelins?

These are inquiries of great significance to us Americans. Wells has pictured civilization as being stamped out in our country by a fleet of relentless air-ships. Can King President any better than King Premier confront a war lord shaped for battle from his youth upward? The belief of Englishmen

and Americans is that the counsel of the many is better than the will of the few in all matters, including national defense. The splendid success of the American Republic and also of the English semi-republic in material and intellectual growth, in invention, commerce, and manufacturing, may stop unless in times of crisis Congress and Parliament can make swift and sufficient provision for national defense. A great army cannot be created in a month or in six months. The condition of free government is that it shall show itself able to cope with governments less free, if the clash of systems and of nations shall come.

A

N American, who will always be remembered by his friends as incarnating a genius for friendship, was living in lodgings in the old street in London in which Franklin stayed, when he received word that one of the most interesting men of his generation was coming to England for the first time a writer who made American, history as interesting as a story of adventure, and to whom the history of England was as familiar as the years of his childhood. The two friends met on the landing-stage when the steamer docked, traveled to London by the first train, drove to the lodgings of the host, dined, and talked as two friends will talk when all the conditions make intimacy not only agreeable but inevitable.

The guest was restless, however, and soon reminded his host that it was his first night in the Old World, and that he was eager for exploration. They started out late in the evening; the street was quiet, the "central roar "had died down into a hoarse murmur. The two men walked swiftly to the Embankment; a low moon hung over the river, the Surrey side had the look of a Whistler etch-" ing, and a vast brooding silence hushed the uproar of the age and steeped the city in the atmosphere of the past. Leaning for a moment over the parapet, the older man cried, "Is this the Thames ?" his great frame

shaking with emotion; and then, catching a glimpse of Westminster Palace, he seized his friend by the arm and swept him impetuously along toward the great pile of buildings in which the past and present greatness of England is enshrined. All night they hurried, breathless and excited, from point to point in the old town; coming home at dawn exhausted not so much by physical fatigue as by emotional strain.

For the guest it had been one of those adventures of the spirit which are so intense that for the moment they seem to drain the very springs of life; for the host it had all the excitement of a new reading of an old book. It was not an approach to a strange civilization, a sudden and dramatic contact with a novel order of things; it was a night of recollection, it was a home-coming. The interest lay not in the strangeness, but in the familiarity of it all. After long absence, filled with study of old places and ancestral associations, the man of the New World had come back to his own and taken possession of the playground of his childhood.

Few people realize that when the West first saw Japan it saw not only a country radically different in manner and way of life from the world with which it was familiar, but an ancient civilization, of a very high order, which had been completely developed

largely in isolation. Much had been received from the continent of Asia, but what had been taken had been modified, adapted, and refashioned by a genius for assimilation which is at the same time intensely individual and tenacious.

Okakura puts these two elements of the Japanese spirit cogently and clearly: "Our sympathizers have been pleased to marvel at the facility with which we have introduced Western science and industries, constitutional government, and the organization necessary for carrying on a gigantic war. They forget that the strength of the movement which brought Japan to her present position is due not less to the innate virility which has enabled her to assimilate the teachings of a foreign civilization than to her capability of adopting its methods. With a race, as with an individual, it is not the accumulation of extraneous knowledge, but the realization of the self within, that constitutes true progress.

Asia has sent almost as many streams of influence into Japan as Europe has sent into this country, and Buddhism and the spirit and thought of the Chinese classics have penetrated and colored Japanese life as the divinations and discoveries of the genius of the Greek and Hebrew have entered into and shaped the view of life of the Western world. But, to the eye, Japan, lying half a day's journey from Asia, is almost as different from China and India as from Italy and England. Until her awakening, which was hastened by Commodore Perry but was in no sense dependent on him, Japan shared the lethargy which lay on China and India. The nation slept in "the night of Asia," but long before the hand of the American knocked at the door the sleeper had begun to stir and the morning light was coming in at the windows.

That lethargy did not, however, mean an arrest of civilization; it meant the preservation of a type of civilization complete in itself.

When the Western peoples saw Japan for the first time sixty years ago, they saw a completely developed civilization of a type that was entirely novel to them. The West had seen strange peoples in many stages of social evolution, from the lowest forms of savage life to the highest forms of semi-barbaric life. In Japan it found a people who had gone to the end of the path which they had followed for twenty-five hundred years.

In India and China the West had come

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face to face with an antiquity beside which its oldest experiences were matters of yesterday, but in both countries the line of normal development had been interrupted and broken again and again. In both countries it found races whose genius long ago made rich tontributions to the common stock of knowledge and will make still greater contributions in the future, but whose territory had been invaded again and again, whose history was largely the story of the incursions of aliens who brought with them different types of mind, strange customs, novel forms of social order, and who, by superior organization or a more aggressive temper, sooner or later became the governing races.

Japanese history, on the other hand, has been the record of a practically uninterrupted racial life. The islands which constitute the Empire of Japan have not only never been conquered, they have never been invaded. The Emperor now reigning is the one hundred and twenty-second of his dynasty; the development of the life of the people, whatever its limitations and defects, has been uninterrupted by disturbance from without. It has been deeply influenced by Asiatic ideals and conventions; but the foreign ideals and manners which have found acceptance by the Japanese have made their way by persuasion, not by arms.

Japan differs radically from the other countries of the East in its possession of a sensitive national consciousness and of a thorough and minute social and political organization. In this respect it stands in striking contrast to other Oriental countries. So far as the feeling of racial unity and the consciousness of sharply defined national aims and interests are concerned, India and China have been mere geographical terms, conveying no such group of ideas, convictions, and mental habits as the words Italy, France, and England convey., Japan, on the other hand, has as keen a sense of its individuality, so to speak, as any Western nation; and in point of thoroughness of organization stands beside Germany. The immense significance of this fact has not yet been recognized in the West.

These facts bring into view the unique conditions which the West found in Japan. sixty years ago: a fully developed civilization, completely realizing its type, and preserved intact by freedom from foreign interference during the earlier centuries of its history and by isolation during the later centuries. The