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schools, in homes, in institutions of all kinds, intelligently and faithfully cared for, that they may lead honorable lives and become honorable citizens. Ought they to bear the burden. of the European war?

Except in very few cases there is no collision of duties here. Americans ought to give to the uttermost to meet the needs of Europe, and they ought to give to the uttermost to meet the needs at home. The stricken Belgian child, homeless and often parentless, ought to be fed by American generosity; and the poor American child ought to be cared for by American generosity. The solution of the problem is not to postpone one generosity to another, but to accept both. It is not a time for retrenchment in giving; it is a time for greater generosity. It is a time for denial of self, not for the denial of others.

This is not a European war only. It is a world crisis. America is just as much involved in it in the moral sense, and even in the financial sense, as if an ocean did not divide us from the battlefields; and America must take the discipline of this tragic moral experience. She cannot stand outside and fold her arms; she has no disposition to do so. She must deny herself and take up her cross and bear it cheerfully and gladly for the sake of One who bore his cross for all men, and to whom little children were sacred. Let us double our gifts. American children must not pay for the European war.

THY NEIGHBOR'S OX

The commandment "Thou shalt not covet" may be said to cover a multitude of sins. "Nor anything that is his" is broad enough and sweeping enough to satisfy the most persistent of loophole-hunting lawyers. Yet, after all, a special pleader for the imagination might find it in his province to ask dispensation for an occasional trespass.

Evidently the commandment itself was written for farmers, for among the articles specifically tabooed to the covetous are two that distinctly belong to the land-and one without which the land is scarcely worth the having. There may have been more in this than meets the first glance, for there are indications that the commandment deals with a temptation to which farmers are particularly exposed; farmers-a folk forever confined within boundaries that limit their plowshares

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yet perpetually invite the eye. Of the strength of this temptation Horace had more than an inkling when he prayed that he might never find it in his heart to send up to the gods the wish, "Oh, if that neighboring spot were added which now disfigures my little field!" The American farmer who still more succinctly expressed his desires by "All I want is what jines me," yielded to his wandering thoughts almost without a struggle. And there was once a king who longed for a neighbor's vineyard and got it.

The king is not to be defended, the modesty of the farmer not to be overestimated, nor is the self-restraint of the poet to be passed by without praise where praise is due. Yet in the instinct behind the action of farmer, poet-farmer, and gentleman-farmer-king there may by judicious search be found a common element not to be despised.

When a bad case is before the court of popular judgment, it is at least wise for the defendant to put his best foot forward, and Horace may be taken as the best foot in the case of "Thou shalt sometime be permitted to covet thy neighbor's field" versus the Ten Commandments.

Let us suppose that Horace, secure in the possession of his portion of land, his garden, his never-failing spring of water, and his little grove of trees, has cast his eyes beyond the metes and boundaries of his own farm, to where, into the symmetry of his holding, juts a ragged spur of alien soil.

Even with all the resources of his own imagination ready at mind, should he have denied himself the pleasure of mentally farming this neighbor land? Putting aside the delights to be won from the game of straightening one's boundaries until they include a large share of the habitable globe as too material a pleasure, there still would have existed for him a very fertile realm of fancy and satisfaction across the forbidden boundary ditch.

If his farming operations went astray, could he not have taken comfort in knowing how much better he could have handled the acres he did not own? Could not Horace, watching his neighbor's slaves as they laboriously planted the individual clumps of alfalfa, have justifiably laid the flattering unction to his soul that on his own farm there existed no such unorthodox spacing of plants as could be laid to the door of the blundering workers across the way?

What if, instead of a cultivated field, the jutting soil of his neighbor's farm harbored

only clumps of rushes unexplored save by water-fowl and vagrant boys? If a surly neighbor, made sullen by the increasing incursions of city folk from Rome, denied him access to this garden wilderness, must Horace therefore have denied himself that chiefest of pleasures that comes from the untasted and the unknown? All the secret places, the silent pools, and the lurking shadows of every dog-guarded field were his for the thinking. Imagination, stimulated by denial, has every right to run riot through many places where wet feet and barked shins are the sole reward of the visitor in the flesh.

Pride in one's own possessions even at the expense of the opinion we hold of our neighbor's is not wholly an ignoble emotion if taken in moderate doses. On the other hand, some time history may discover that Naboth lost his vineyard solely because he chose to dispute with his king the proper method of pruning his grapes. With entire propriety, however, we may reserve to ourselves the right to covet a joy which vanishes with the possession of its source. Those who own the lakes, the mountains, and the streams by the right and power of a penmarked paper are not to be envied by those who hold these things in fee through the imagination. Alexander sighing for more worlds to conquer was immeasurably poorer than a man who holds in his heart the unseen beauty of a single thicket across his neighbor's fence.

THE THINKER ON THE STAGE

The memorial of Edwin Booth, the design for which The Outlook gives its readers this week, is to be placed in Gramercy Park, one of the most attractive of New York's smaller parks, near the Players Club, of which he was the founder. It shows the great actor in one of his characteristic attitudes. Above all the players of his time, he was the thinker on the stage; those who saw him in "Hamlet" will always feel that they have seen the most impressive and appealing of all the Shakespearean figures. For Booth seemed to be born for the part, as Miss Maude Adams was born to bring Sir James Barrie's women and children out of fairyland and make them the companions of happy hours in the theater.

The Hamlet of Shakespeare bears traces

of the rude age in which Hamlet was born, but the transforming touch of the great dramatist has given him princely dignity and graciousness. Othello has far more dramatic directness, because his character is simple and he is the easy victim of craft and subtlety; Macbeth stands out with more distinctness because he is impelled by a single passion reinforced and driven on by the stronger personality beside him; Lear is more elemental, and moves on a stage over which the cosmic forces seem to play. Among these passionate and powerful figures Hamlet seems remote and detached-a spirit brooding while his fellows act, plunged in meditation while they draw the sword with an impulse which knows no pause of uncertainty.

Hamlet must think his problem out, and, steeped in meditation as he moves about in an atmosphere which makes his very soul ill, his personal problem takes on the magnitude of life. He must see his way clearly because he is dealing with the whole order of things, and his personal perplexity is part of the universal mystery. When a thinker reaches his decision, his action is often more sweeping in its destructiveness than the action that springs from primitive impulse and spends itself in a single thrust. At the end Hamlet sweeps the stage with the fury of a tropical storm.

Thought invests a man with dignity as with a garment woven out of the substance of his own nature. Meditation makes for courtesy, for the refinement of bearing and manner which are born of wide charity of thought in dealing with one's fellows. Booth's Hamlet moved through a crude and violent age like a man of a later time; the ripeness of a richer and gentler age made him conspicuously the gentleman among Shakespeare's men of tragic fate. Edwin Booth had the indefinable quality of distinction. He was always the thinker bred to the finer uses of life, shaped to its most delicate customs. His nature and his art were in happy accord. Those who knew him loved him for a chivalry that made him gentle and brave and sweet in a life as full of tragedy as the dramas with which his name is associated.

His figure, standing in one of the quiet places of the noisy city, will teach a later generation that art and life may speak with one voice, and courage and strength may give sadness a winning sweetness.

conceive of was abrogated from Chinese control. Not only were the sixty-odd square miles of Tsingtao and its vicinity made over outright, but a semicircular line thirty-five miles beyond Tsingtao from coast to coast, bounding a "sphere of interest,' a term of infinitely flexible meaning, brought the total leased territory up to almost two hundred square miles. Other directly stated "spheres of interest" included a strip of land fifteen miles wide along a projected railway line to the provincial capital at Tsinanfu, mining rights at Weihsien and Poshan, with clauses to cover any places which might look more desirable, and, indeed, the acknowledgment of a humiliating suzerainty over the whole province of Shantung. The Germans stipulated, and they have held China strictly to their word ever since, that no industrial or commercial operation whatsoever was to be undertaken in this vast province, half as large as the Kingdom of Prussia itself, unless the Germans had first call on furnishing the capital and all the perquisites of patronage and control which this kind of mortgage in possession gives throughout the Far East. Add to this that, under the provisions of a mere lease, the Germans also acquired the right to build dock-yards and barracks at their own free will, and assumed the right to intrench themselves on Chinese territory behind fortifications rivaling those of Port Arthur, and China's penalty for the acts of an irresponsible mob, who were later successfully rounded up and justly punished by the native authorities, seems to have been exacted with an unusually ruthless completeness.

So it was, then, that Germany made good her promised foothold of empire at Tsingtao. The Germans have never boasted of their exploit, but, on the other hand, they have never sought to excuse it by high-sounding phrases about their "mission to China." Ex-Commissioner Rohrbach, of German Southwest Africa, puts Germany's candid colonial point of view in an inimitable sentence from his book on "The German Colonies," accredited from the most exalted stations. Could German aggression be more pithily or frankly admitted than in his words? "In order to appease the sensibilities of the Chinese," he says, "the arrangement was looked upon simply in the light of a lease for ninety-nine years.'

Now, with eighty-three years still to run, this lease seems on the point of being as arbitrarily terminated, and by that same irre

pressible nation which spiked the Russian arrangement "made later in the same year about Port Arthur. In the present collapse of the status quo in China no one can venture to predict what the Japanese will do with Tsingtao if they succeed in capturing it. But one must face the fact now that what becomes of Tsingtao is going to be of incalculable importance to eastern Asia, and to all the nations that have interests therein. For Tsingtao, unlike Port Arthur, is more than a mere fortress establishing a foothold in a province; in the imminent industrial and commercial development of the Far East it is bound to be one of the master keys of China. That the Germans saw this and took the peremptory advantage of it they did will always remain a monument to their foresight, if not to their fair play.

It is on military lines that the Germans first built up their power in Tsingtao, however, and it is by the test of war that that power is to-day being threatened; so the military aspects of Tsingtao deserve first and most obvious consideration. The town of Tsingtao, it should be said by the way, is the mixed German and Chinese city at the head of Kiaochau Bay; it really constitutes the bulk of the colony itself, which is rather inaptly named Kiaochau from the bay and from a village just outside the German sphere of influence. As soon as the Germans took over control, the present vast scheme of fortifications, already decided upon, was put under way by an army of engineers and skilled workmen specially sent out from home. They constructed a ring of twelve modern forts, stretching from the high, rocky peninsula of Laoshan on the north, along the thickly wooded ridges back of Tsingtao, six miles from the harbor mouth, and out again along the southern peninsula of Lingshan. They spent $7,000,000 in dredging the harbor and the bay, they constructed a floating dock capable of lifting sixteen thousand tons, they sunk granite piers and built a modern graving dock capable of accommodating respectively the largest merchant ships and men-ofwar afloat. In ten years $30,000,000 was spent on harbor works alone. The barracks built in 1908 were capable of housing five thousand men; and the three thousand first sent out have been steadily increased till to-day the regular forces now defending the colony, excluding twenty-five hundred volunteers from the settlement itself, number over six thousand, including a squadron of

cavalry, a company of field artillery, two machine-gun companies, five companies of naval artillery, an aeroplane corps of four. units, and a company of native reserves.

The military necessities of the colony have only begun in the present decade to make way for the industrial campaign for which they have always been the far-reaching groundbreaker. Invariably, up to the last year or two, out of an average budget of $3,500,000 something like $3,000,000 has been contributed by the Imperial Treasury at Berlin and used for "extraordinary" expenditure, relying on ordinary" or local funds for hardly a tenth of the administrative expenses of Tsingtao. In this way the Prussian officers who ruled this outpost of empire have spent ten marks on military works to every one mark on the civilian population.

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Under this autocratic situation the growth of the colony has been rapid, but, for all its emphasis on guns and barracks, it has not been nearly so one-sided as one would think. The experiments in municipal government which have been tried at Tsingtao have been strongly reminiscent of those of our own Nation in seeing through our National emergency at Panama. Under an autocracy proceeding straight from Berlin, the citizens of Tsingtao enjoy the most democratic and radical landtaxing system in the Far East-a system which lacks very little of following out the pure single-tax theories of Henry George. Colonial revenue is derived from a 33 cent increment tax, and an annual tax of six per cent on land values irrespective of improvements. Under this régime land speculation, which forces residents in the international settlement of Shanghai, for instance, to pay an average of a third of their earnings in rent alone, has in Tsingtao been practically eliminated as a factor in municipal life. It is these same Prussian autocrats who have made Tsingtao a free port, have reforested four thousand acres of bleak hillsides, and have built up a settlement which for civic beauty, cleanliness, and general municipal efficiency is without a peer in the Far East. And to the social side of life they have added, with the true convivial spirit of the German, a magnificent $1,500,000 casino, which is deservedly one of the show places of the colony.

As a modern fortress, as a modern city, Tsingtao is a remarkable achievement, but it is as a key to industrial and commercial empire that one touches at last its illimitable destiny.

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The Germans have built and are operating so far two railways in China-that from Tsingtao to Tsinanfu, the capital of Shantung, and that from Tientsin to the southern border of Shantung, where a British section continues it to Pukow, opposite the Yangtse from Nanking, which is, in turn, the terminus of a British road to Shanghai. Tsingtao is thus in railway communication with Shanghai and the Yangtse, with Tientsin, Peking, and with Europe via the Trans-Siberian. The seven hundred odd miles of this German system, coupled with Tsingtao's unrivaled harbor facilities, have drawn trade from every port in the north of China. No other port has grown as this has grown; no other port, save Shanghai, can stand the pace Tsingtao has set. In the years between 1900 and 1905 its trade increased from $3,000,000 to just over $16,000,000; in 1911 it had more than doubled, at $33,000,000 registering a gain of one thousand per cent in a little over ten years. At whose expense this gain was made is significant in the drop evidenced by the Shantung treaty port of Chefu, for instance, from $27,000,000 to $21,500,000 between 1904 and 1911.

But the commercial growth of Tsingtao up to the present has been a provincial growth; it has consolidated itself as the principal and natural port of Shantung. The designs of the future aim to place her magnificent tactical position in the path of what must in time become one of the main currents of China's national commerce. They aim at nothing less than the establishment at Tsingtao, as the concentration point, on the coast, of the vast system of trunk railways now being rapidly extended over China. If Tsingtao had been left in Chinese hands, it would have been the inevitable and unrivaled outlet, failing the development at enormous expense of a new port on the Yangtse or just above it, by which the transcontinental systems of middle and north China must ultimately reach the sea. The Germans foresaw this great opportunity, as they foresaw others in 1898, and the commercial arm of the Kaiser's Imperialism has pushed steadily and very effectively in this direction ever since. hind the flamboyant military pretensions of Kiaochau Bay the Germans have really been at work, unobtrusively but permanently, building up the San Francisco of the Chinese

coast.

Be

The Germans understand that the coming domination of the foreigners in modern China