The Associated Powers subscribed to this undertaking, the United States leading in the matter. When, however, the two groups assembled at the Conference of Versailles, in view of the orEganization of the new peace, the former, represented by England, France, Italy, and Japan, protested that imperialism is, in principle, non-suppressible, explaining that it proceeds from vital necessities inseparable from the growth and development of the nations, and that in pledging themselves to put an end to its operations both sides had miscalculated their capacity of execution. They insisted that the only practical means of dealing with imperialism, classed by them among the elemental forces of the world, was to accept its existence as inevitable and to remain content with canalizing and regulating its action, which was far from being always a source of evil, as, for instance, in its relation to the hopelessly barbarous places.

It cannot be denied that the views propounded by the Allied Powers corresponded in substance to the facts of the situation. Under the pressure of the fierce political and economic rivalry dominating a world whose resources are very unevenly distributed and in which great differences exist in the degree of civilization and power of the nations, it is inevitable that the strong and highly developed among the latter should seek in imperialistic enterprises, at the expense of the weak and undeveloped, a solution of the problems of their ex

tremely complicated existence. In the last analysis, imperialism in this form, which is the prevailing form, constitutes a manifestation of the instinct of selfpreservation asserting itself irresistibly in the international struggle for life. Its misdeeds are covered by the law of the survival of the fittest. Manifestly, imperialism is bound to defy opposition.

The views of the Allied Powers prevailed and were embodied precisely in the mandatory system.

power. In a word, this system was meant to establish a compromise between the antagonistic principles of imperialism and self-determination, whereby what is excessive and injurious in each was meant to be rendered inoperative and what is reasonable and useful made to concur to the welfare of humanity.

A

PPLIED in a spirit of sincerity and good faith, the mandatory system might have rendered great services to the cause of international concord and peace. Unfortunately, when it came to the actual point of reconstructing on a new basis the political order of the world, the imperialist Powers-en l'espèce the Allied Powers as distinct from the Associated, in particular the United States, which protested in vain-used this system simply as a means of disguising their ambitions, which were allowed to operate free from restraint under cover of the forms provided by the system, the principles underlying it being totally disregarded. An arbitrary classification was made of the less-advanced peoples, some being granted independence which were not entitled to it, while others which offered guaranties of self-reformation and self-development were placed under the mandatory régime, just as suited the convenience of the imperialist Powers. On the other hand, the latter entered upon their mandatory rôle firmly resolved to transform their temporary missions into permanent occupations. In a word, the spirit of imperialism had resumed full sway over them, sweeping away at one blow the good resolutions they had formed-admitting these to have been sincere at any time.

As conceived at Versailles, this system implied the maintenance of the principle of imperialism as part of the public law of the world, but it aimed at holding it in check to the extent that was possible. By discriminating carefully between the less advanced peoples, it was expected to prevent imperialism from operating uncontrolled in all directions. By conferring mandates of administraBy conferring mandates of administration on the imperialist Powers in regions coveted by them its object was to provide these Powers with the means of promoting the selfish interest figuring at the back of their expansionist ambitions, as safely and for as long as they might hope to do so through conquest, rendering thereby superfluous recourse to this violent and world-disturbing method of action. At the same time the mandatory action. At the same time the mandatory system was intended to safeguard the native and world interest, since it confided the missionary work envisaged by the Doctrine of Status According to Merit to nations standing ex hypothesi in the forefront of civilization and

Of the false situations thus created, the establishment of a French mandate over Syria was precisely one.

Compared with the Western nations, the Syrians do not represent a high grade of civilization. But neither do they deserve to be classed among the incapable and helpless peoples. They have retained much of the old Arab culture, while displaying, on the other hand, considerable dispositions for modern progress, especially in the economic sphere. Syria was the most advanced and prosperous province of the Ottoman Empire, thanks to the industriousness, intelligence, and progressivenes of its native population. There is no reason whatever to believe that the Syrians are less fit for the rôle of an independentnation than the Greeks or Bulgarians, who were allowed to attain this status at one bound in the pre-war changes introduced in the Near East.

If this people was included in the list of backward races requiring foreign

guidance, it was simply because France, which has always laid a reversionary claim to their country on the flimsy ground that it fell within the scope of her "moral and cultural influence," would not be denied the satisfaction of this ambition at the disruption of the Ottoman Empire. There was no justification for the occupation of Syria either from the point of view of the superior interest of France or from that of the interest of the Syrians and the world at large. It was a wanton manifestation of imperialism for the sake of imperialism.

What made matters worse is that, instead of serving as a means of procuring for Syria the benefits of an up-to-date modern administration, the French mandate was prostituted to such unworthy ends as exploiting mercilessly this land, which was being stripped methodically of its wealth in the selfish interest of France, and fostering the dissensions dividing its populations from of old, with a view to consolidating French rule on the principle of divide et impera. The moral and economic retrogression of the country was the result-a lamentable anti-climax in the operation of the mandatory system.

Under these circumstances, it was natural that the Syrians, whose valiant resistance to the occupation of their country had given the measure of the

nationalist feeling animating them, nationalist feeling animating them, should rebel at the first opportunity. The local Druse rising was the beginning of a reaction which threatened to embrace the entire mandated territory in its scope, an extension of armed operations which, to judge by the abominations already committed on both sides, must have resulted in terrible devastation and effusion of blood. Here was a grave miscarriage of the mandatory system. Imperialism, breaking bounds, had added a new chapter to its tragic annals.

Q

UITE unexpectedly, however, the French Government in power as I write, recognizing the errors of its predecessors, adopted a policy of conciliation and propitiation by offering the Syrians terms of peace based on the recognition of their claims to independence. M. de Jouvenel, the new High Commissioner, invited the insurgents to lay down. their arms preparatory to the granting of a truly autonomous régime to their country whose conditions are to be fixed by the Syrian people themselves and which is to be followed in the near future by complete independence. There is no doubt that the Druses, although still refractory because they refuse to believe wrongly, this time, according to all appearances-in the sincerity of the French offers, will finally accept them, the mandatory Power seeming disposed

to take an indulgent view of any prolongation of their resistance in the interval."

The case is unique in history of a great and powerful country offering to make amends to a victim of its imperialist enterprises while still engaged in an armed struggle for supremacy with the latter. It does honor to France, whose generous retreat is the outstanding feature of the Syrian situation and constitutes a new departure in the treatment of the imperialist problem. What threatened to assume the character and proportions of a great international tragedy has developed into an occasion for the accomplishment of an act of reparation in what seems to be a real spirit of re pentance foreshadowing the return of one of the leading European Powers to the sane and equitable conception of imperialism which inspired the adoption of the mandatory system. All is well that ends well.

The Syrian rising acted as a reminder to France that imperialism practiced at the expense of peoples with a historic past and conscious of their individuality and rights, whatever their actual condition, defeats its own purpose by becoming an endless cause of strife and a constant drain on the resources of all concerned. France has taken the lesson to heart. Would that the other imperialist Powers followed her example!

TH

66

HESE two names, Squire Bancroft and the author of "John Halifax, Gentleman," are placed together for the simple reason that on a day this spring much notice was taken of them in the chief London journals. Sir Squire Bancroft had just died, his years being eighty-five, and on that day fell the centenary of the birth of the author of "John Halifax, Gentleman." Each was a figure the man delighting in the courteous publicity he received, the woman shrinking from notice.

Sir Squire Bancroft (he was knighted in 1897 for "notable services to his profession") was certainly a figure in twentieth-century London, or that portion of it which lies between Albany, where he lived (Lady Bancroft died in 1921), and the Garrick and Athenæum Clubs. Between those places you might

often see him strolling, for he was "Retired Leisure," to quote Charles Lamb's apt phrase; but when he retired from the stage he did not decline into slippers, fireside, and old clothes-not he; this handsome survival undertook the rôle of a figure in London life, with occasional reappearances on the boards.

Time passed, and he became an octogenarian dandy; but he did not ape youth. Sartorial developments had no effect upon him. He wore the clothes of the 'seventies or 'eighties such as he wore as Captain Hawtree in "Caste"but his clothes always looked new and were beautifully cut, and he wore the shiniest and tallest silk hat in London. As you passed this tall, distinguishedlooking man with the white curly hair and the eye-glass kept miraculously in its place you could not help noticing

him. He liked it; he liked acknowledging the frequent salutes of strangers. We liked him because he stood for an older England, when men had time to be courteous, slow-moving, and friendly; when the morning walk was an event, and the afternoon walk was an event, and the dress for each occasion had to be considered with care. Sir Squire Bancroft strolled through twentieth-century London; it was said of him, "No man ever was so distinguished as Sir Squire Bancroft looked."

But I must not give the impression that he was a lazy man. Far from it.

1 Since this article was written the clashes between the Druses and the French forces have continued. As we pointed out in the issue of July 7, however, the French are now far more confident than before of being able to deal with the military situation because of the subsidence of the campaign in the Riff. It is to be hoped that they still maintain the willingness to deal with the people of Syria in the liberal spirit to which our contributor calls attention.-The Editors.

He had lived so long, he had garnered so nuch experience of actors, acting, and plays, that he was regarded as the grandfather of the theatrical profession; he was always ready with advice and help. He was President of the Actors' Association, of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and Chairman of the Foundling Hospital. Among other benefactions, he gave £1,000 to "General" Booth's "Darkest England" scheme; but his great achievement after he had retired from the stage was the readings he gave, year after year, of Dickens's "Christmas Carol," by which he raised more than £20,000 for hospitals in England and Canada.

If you wished to see Sir Squire Bancroft in later years, you would call upon him at his cozy, spacious chambers in Albany-the delightful, secluded walk with apartments at either side, and a watchful beadle at either end, that runs from Piccadilly to Burlington Gardens, where Macaulay and other eminent men lived. Sir Squire's rooms were at the Piccadilly end, facing Albany Courtyard. It was an ideal place for him. The noisy present is shut out; residents may commune with the ghosts of the past and feel as they pace the flags that there is at least one place in London which the tides of "progress" do not wash.

You will observe that I call this protected place with goldfish in bowls in the windows of the ground-floor chambers and shrubs in the little trim gardens Albany, not The Albany. Refer to it in print as The Albany, and you will have half a dozen indignant letters from old Londoners-sticklers for accuracy. There

The late Sir Squire Bancroft

were originally three houses on the site, and one of the owners was the first Lord Melbourne, who rebuilt his house, and then changed dwellings with the Duke of York and Albany. Whence the name. In 1804 the garden was built over, the flagged pathway made, and the chambers built.

By this time the reader may be addressing to himself this question, What kind of an actor was Squire Bancroft, who became so great a figure in Pall Mall, St. James's Street, and Piccadilly?

He was not a great actor, but he. shared with his talented, wife, Marie Wilton, in great things. From 1865 to 1879 they ran the little Prince of Wales's Theatre, off Tottenham Court Road, and from 1880 to 1884 the Haymarket Theatre. They found a playwright to suit them-Tom Robertson.. There must be a few still alive who remember the production of "Society," "Ours," "School," and other plays of the charming "teacup and saucer school." Incidentally, the Bancroft-Wilton management made its fortune, but it also raised the stage, improved the condition of actors, and attracted an educated and refined public.

Of this we thought when we saw this distinguished Victorian, in the evening of his days, walking leisurely from club to club, or raising the tone of a meeting over which he presided, or moving, perfectly garbed, through a picture gallery private view.

I pass to the other Victorian, Dinah Maria Mulock (Mrs. Craik), author of "John Halifax, Gentleman." She was not an intellectual woman, says one of her biographers, and she did not read much. But in 1852 she saw Tewkesbury, which she called "Norton Bury," and the Abbey, and the "House of the Fourteen Windows," and the Bell Inn, and five years later, with great care, she wrote "John Halifax, Gentleman," which has become one of the most famous of lesser English novels. It still creeps into lists of the "One Hundred Best Books," and when I was in Tewkesbury last summer I found the place she described fragrant and busy. with her memory.

This good woman, who was ever active in good works, wrote little else worth reading; but what a triumph to have produced one book that has passed into the language, and to be remembered for it with acclamations and speeches in this post-war cynical, frothy twentieth century!

Two eminent, prominent Victorians! We salute them, and enshrine their memories in Albany and Tewkesbury.

AVE you ever seen Niagara Falls?" asked the polite Englishman at a formal London dinner, thirty years or so ago, by way of making conversation with the charming American on his left.

"My father owns 'em," replied Miss Porter, of Buffalo. And she did not greatly exaggerate.

There's a good deal of American real estate left about Niagara Falls, and practically every bit of it is actually as stated by Buffalo. Giving the family name of "Buffalo," in the sense of metropolitan area, to all that westernmost district of New York State comprising the Tonawandas, Martinsville, Wurlitzer, Pekin, Wilson, St. Johnsburg, and the municipality of Niagara Falls-all that clustering neighborhood which looks on and profits by the dropping of the river most gloriously over its precipice-Buffalo in that sense owns Niagara Falls, "owns 'em" in joint tenancy with Canada. The one - million - five-hundred-thousandcandle power electric projectors that nightly bedizen the American Falls are set up on the Canadian side for the de-, lectation of international tourists. The heavy majority of the money-spending tourists come from the American side and most of the tremendous electric energy generated on both sides of the falling, mist-haloed boundary flows into United States industry. Although the ownership is joint, most of the wonder

and the wallop are Buffalo's. The ownership of the Falls handed down by the fathers is a useful thing for the children, Porters and others, unto the third and fourth generation. Buffalo believes it.

The local brotherhood who deal in matters of terra firma and fixtures thereupon under the mystic name of "realtors" call this big city at the meeting of many waters "the Garden Spot of Industry." As a matter of demonstrable fact they are right. Buffalo, in the metropolitan-area sense, is a tract of urban and suburban real estate as thickly sown with industrial plants as any region of equal area well could be. Some of the plants come up from seed well watered by lake and river and canal; others are grafted on older growths to give fruit more abundantly; many are transplanted from far-distant soils and, in the hands of the Buffalo Burbanks, made to grow more luxuriantly here.

Tune in on Station "R-L-T-R" any night, and you will hear something like this coming from the eastern shores of Lake Erie: "The Buffalo area," booms a sonorous voice supreme over static and S. O. S. calls. "The Buffalo area-there are, my friends, no city limits to-day anywhere-is the supreme example of a scientific, economic industrial center." Far away in the less scientific Northwest Minneapolis admits the soft impeachment, It is cheaper to haul grain in big-bellied freighters down the big Lakes

and mill it at their eastern, Buffalo, terminus than to pay east-bound freight on barrels of flour milled by the Mississippi at the St. Paul head of navigation. Accordingly Minneapolis shakes its dusty clothes, and Buffalo is in a fair way to become the great flour-milling center of the United States. The Minneapolis millers-the Washburn-Crosbys, the Pillsburys, and the rest of the staffof-life brotherhood-have moved on to Buffalo while continuing to do business much as usual in Minnesota for their Western markets. Airplane pictures of their grain-elevator stalagmites, sprouting in the midst of railway yards, canals, and Lake estuaries in the Niagara territory, more than prove what the realtors say about that particular plot of their "Garden" development. Naturally, Buffalo believes what the pictures show.

The impressive thing is that Canada believes it too. In recent years, according to figures, quoted in the Dominion Parliament, something between seventyfour per cent and eighty per cent of Canadian grain shipped eastward from the western provinces by way of Fort William and Port Arthur has gone through the elevators and the flour mills of Buffalo, the great bulk of it in bond for ultimate export from Atlantic ports.

The airplane pictures show this Canadian grain lying in capacious cargo boats that have come the long Lake way from