not succeed in devising a modus vivendi in accordance with the general principles of international law, which will at the same time meet the peculiar facts and circumstances of this unprecedented war."

JOHN MUIR: NATURALIST

Those who fear that life has lost its color in these bustling times of practical work will do well to read the life of John Muir, who died at Los Angeles the day before Christmas, at the ripe age of seventy-six.

: Conditions have changed since Drake scoured the seas under an informal arrangement with Queen Elizabeth by which he divided the spoils with her when he was successful and she disowned any connection with him when he got into trouble. Those were brave days; and Drake, Frobisher, and the men of that time were brave men. But these are brave days too; and much more considerate of other people's rights.

Into this quieter age John Muir was born, with a clear brain, an energetic will, and an indomitable thirst for growth and life. He sprang from a soil prolific of heroic men and women who have combined idealism and practical good sense; for he saw the light of day in Dunbar, Scotland. After the Scotch fashion, he went to school almost as soon as he was born-that is to say, at the age of three. Two years later, at the manly age of five, he was, according to his own story, a belligerent of extraordinary vitality and success among his fellow-pupils. Half a dozen fights in a day with the other school-boys was no uncommon occurrence; and the natural history chapters in the school readers divided his interest with these fisticuff adventures.

One night his father came home and said, quietly, Bairns, you needna learn your lessons the nicht, for we're gan to America the morn;" and to America the family came and began life as pioneers in Wisconsin.

It was

an orderly house, ruled by rules; but the boy John, although not allowed to study at night, secured permission to begin at one o'clock in the morning. This was a highly characteristic Scotch arrangement: the law was kept to the letter, but completely shattered in fact.

The boy was already busy with his jackknife making new kinds of kites and clocks, although he had never seen a clock, and showing extraordinary versatility of mind and skill

of hand. He devised an automatic sawmill, a bathing-machine, a thermometer which, being fastened to the side of the house, registered the temperature by the expansion and contraction of the metal of which it was made. At the age of twenty-two the young mechanician set out to visit the State Fair at Madison, carrying with him a lot of wooden machines. Since his arrival in Wisconsin he had never been six miles from home before; but the engineer and conductor found a fellowspirit in him, and he went to Madison in the locomotive. His devices awakened wide interest; but he had the good sense to be modest; and he did not even read the accounts of his machines in the newspapers.

While he was in town he learned that he could study at the State University; and he spent four years in the institution, paying his own way. Not long after leaving college he made a long walking trip through four or five States. It was characteristic of the quality of his mind that in his traveling-bag he carried Burns's Poems, Milton's "Paradise Lost,' and the New Testament. Cuba and Florida were included in this journey. Later he went, by way of the Isthmus, to San Francisco, where he arrived without a dollar. He cared nothing for the city; but he immediately lost his heart to the Sierra Nevadas; and began on foot that intimate acquaintance which lasted all his life and developed into a passionate affection.

He was the real discoverer of the "glorious Yosemite," as he called it. He not only discovered it, but he presently turned his study, observation, and acquaintance with it to such account that he reversed all the accepted opinions as to its geological history. It was characteristic of him that the Yosemite, one of the most sublimely beautiful landscapes in the world, captivated him; and that he should put a practical basis under his feet by managing a sawmill. He was an example of the kind of education which makes a man's hand serve his brain.

In 1876 he became a member of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey and saw Alaska, traveling many miles alone. Two years later he joined the expedition which went in search of De Long, and had the opportunity of studying the coast of Siberia, visiting most of the important ice rivers, and preparing for his later trip to Norway and Switzerland. Although of a daring genius, as all great adventurers must be, he was a man of scientific habits of mind, careful obser

vation, thorough reflection, and had an eye for a fact, whether it was written in a book or in stones. All this time he was not only a naturalist, but an artist; for the soul of the hills spoke to his soul, and there was a wonderful fellowship between them. John Muir belonged to a type very often praised, very rarely realized: he was a natural man. He lived on the most intimate terms with nature, but not after the savage fashion. On the contrary, his intelligence was of the keenest and his training had been of the best. So he became not only an explorer and lover of the hills, but their defender and champion. He was a resolute fighter for the right of the people to own their scenery and forests; and readers of The Outlook have not forgotten the brave fight he made for the preservation of the Yosemite, and later of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which is in the immediate neighborhood of the Yosemite and shares to an extraordinary degree its combination of beauty and sublimity. In this fight he was seconded by the tireless devotion of Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson, then editor of the "Century Magazine."

The big trees fascinated him. "No other tree in the world," he said, "as far as I know, has looked down on so many centuries as the Sequoia, or opens such impressive and suggestive views into history." These trees, like the impressive cryptomeria of Japan, have become National emblems.

Mr. Muir knew not only the trees, but he knew all the creatures that lived in them and about them. Ten years ago his passion for the study of forests took him to Russia, Siberia, India, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand, and later he saw the great forests of Brazil. An extensive trip in South America was followed by an expedition to South Africa, where he visited the Victoria Falls, and saw the great baobab tree, one of the giants of the forest.

He declined all invitation to go indoors; and to the end of his life spent a great deal of time in camps and shacks out of doors, a past-master of the art and knowledge of the camper. Harvard and other universities gave him honorary degrees; he was invited to teach in college class-rooms; he wrote for magazines and journals, and he published a few books; but he was always the adventurer at large; one of the most striking figures of our time; a typical American in his simplicity, courage, love of nature, and insatiable curiosity to understand the world in which he lived.

THE CHALLENGE OF

TROUBLE

If anxieties and troubles were the accidents of life and had no more significance than the falling of a leaf or the dropping of an acorn, they would have no permanent effect on us; they would pass and vanish like the clouds. But they not only work lasting changes in us; we choose the nature of those changes. It has been said that the happenings of life are of small consequence, but the way in which we meet the happenings is of supreme importance. If life were the product of a blind force, external conditions would determine our success or failure, our happiness or unhappiness; as a matter of fact, they barely touch our real fortunes; they affect our comfort, ease, pleasures; they have little to do with character, moral power, the consciousness of having a soul behind our intelligence and a heart behind our work.

Conditions master weak natures only; they challenge strength, endurance, courage, and pay tribute to the steady purpose, the resolute will. It is easy to sail with the wind; one must have knowledge, skill, judgment, to sail against the wind.

If troubles and anxieties were not the ministers of a higher purpose in the world, they would crush us or leave us as they find us; they would beat us to the ground or pass over as the birds pass and leave no trace of their flight. We do not stand helpless before them; they offer us weakness or strength and we choose which we shall take. We shrink instinctively from troubles, as we shrink from hard and painful tasks; we cannot escape the suffering they bring; but we decide whether they shall weaken or strengthen us. It lies with us to receive them as enemies or as friends. They offer us fortitude, patience, courage, strength, growth, or cowardice, bitterness, despair; we cannot prevent their coming to us, but we can decide whether they shall help or hinder us.

Trouble and anxiety are cruel masters but wonderful teachers; they prepare us to understand the deepest mysteries, they make us strong for the greatest tasks, they open the way to incalculable treasures of sympathy and love. In a world which is fashioned to aid, enrich, and strengthen our spirits nothing comes to us devoid of meaning; everything that meets us challenges us and compels us to choose to become stronger or weaker.

My dear D

In pursuance of my promise to you the other day, I shall in this letter endeavor to tell you without rancor or heat why I think the present attitude of the governing class of Germany is diametrically opposed to the right principles of human freedom and progress, and why I hope, for the sake of civilizationand not least for the sake of German civilization-that Germany will be decisively beaten in the present conflict.

I take this position with grateful recognition of what the whole world owes to the Germanic people in the science of government, in bravery, in efficiency, in industrial development, in education, and in art, music, and poetry; with full recognition of the splendid economic and industrial achievements of modern Germany in the face of artificial and natural obstacles that would have hopelessly discouraged a less courageous, persistent, and gifted people; with regretful recognition of the fact that the Imperial history of Great Britain in its earlier stages was blotted with deeds of force and selfish injustice, often masquerading under the pretense of a desire to act as the vicegerent of a benevolent Providence.

Your ancestors were German, mine were English, and we are both heart-whole and enthusiastic Americans. Were this 1814 instead of 1914, I hope we should be standing shoulder to shoulder under Blücher and Wellington, fighting against the militaristic pretensions of Napoleon, who wanted to impose his ideas of civilization, many of them fine, upon the whole of Europe.

Let me begin with two definitions which seem to me axiomatic: First, I do not assert that all wars are barbarous, but that war is necessary only because of the survival of barbarism.

I applaud the American Revolution, although it was war, because it was courageous resistance against the barbaric attempt of George III to deprive his colonists of certain inalienable rights; I condemn the Mexican War of 1846 because it was made for the purpose of acquiring the territory of Texas from Mexico by force; we should have obtained it, as we obtained Louisiana from France or Alaska from Russia, by purchase, or we should not have obtained it at all.

Second, I do not assert that crime cannot

be suppressed by force, but I do assert that virtue cannot be promoted by force.

This axiom is completely expressed by the homely proverb, "You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink." I can prevent my boy from lying to me by whipping him, but I can make him truthful only by persuading him voluntarily to love truth.

Bearing in mind these two axiomatic statements-that war is a necessary survival of barbarism, and that virtue cannot be imposed on an individual, a nation, or an epoch by force-let us consider in outline the course of the German Empire since it was created by the present Kaiser's grandfather with the aid of his masterful Minister, Bismarck.

Price Collier, in his penetrating, critical, but not unsympathetic book "Germany and the Germans," shows us as well as any modern writer how what we now call the German Empire was for a long period during the Middle Ages, and even in modern times, a mere congeries of conflicting or quarreling states, which nevertheless produced great historical personalities, such as Goethe in the field of literature, Kant in the field of philosophy, Luther in the field of religion, and in the field of music the greatest trio of their age, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Under the noble-minded William I and the great Bismarck this congeries was welded into a splendid whole-the modern German Empire.

Since June, 1871, when William I was proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles, the German nation has made astounding strides in the arts of peace as well as in the science of politics. It has developed an industrial system which excites the admiration and sometimes the envy of the civilized world. It has sent its sturdy citizens to carry on the world's work with characteristic German efficiency to the uttermost parts of the earth. It has contributed to the United States many thousands of its sons and daughters, who are among the very best of our loyal American citizens.

It has not only carried industrial efficiency to a higher degree than probably any other modern people, but it has been a leader in the movement for social justice. Modern Germany has shown the rest of the world the practicality of old age pensions, workingmen's insurance, rural banking, and model housing

for wage-workers. With only two harbors, and those artificially made on muddy rivers debouching into the North Sea, it has created a deep-sea merchant marine second only to that of Great Britain, and far superior to that of the United States, which possesses a coast line and natural harbors immeasurably finer than those of any European Power.

In showing what can be done by efficient social co-operation, the achievements of modern Germany should put the American people, with their great resources and their recognized individual talents, to shame. The modern German universities, especially in the field of research, have given thousands of American scientists and educators their training.

Our debt to German education is large and unquestioned.

I do not wonder that the German nation, with these accomplishments to its credit, should feel its oats," to use a Yankee colloquialism, and should believe that in the process of evolution it is its turn to dominate not merely Europe, but the world, as Englishspeaking civilization and institutions have dominated it during the last two or three centuries. I do not wonder that Germany feels that if she had a better access to the Atlantic Ocean, to the Mediterranean, and to the Far East she could accomplish for the progress of the human race in the future even more glorious achievements than Great Britain has performed in the past. I do not wonder that when you stand in Nuremberg or Hildesheim you feel as I do when I stand in the cathedral close of Salisbury, the town from which my English ancestors came to New Hampshire in 1640. I understand the psychology of a modern German's ambitions; for every man of character has such ambitions for himself, for his family, for his country.

But here I part company with the political, philosophical, and military leaders of modern. Germany. It is not merely by a man's ambition that he is to be judged, but by the methods he adopts for putting those ambitions into effect. I admit that one of the early, but now fortunately crumbled and buried, foundation stones of the British Empire was buccaneering. But in the evolutionary progress of the human race buccaneering has now gone out of date. The aggrandizing principles of Sir Francis Drake are to-day as archaic the aggrandizing principles of Napoleon. They can no more be tolerated by the modern world, with its improved standards of human responsibility, than the

principles of the American railway kings of the last quarter of the nineteenth century can be tolerated in American railway administration to-day. The English buccaneers and the American railway plutocrats have passed together into the lumber-room of history, never, if you and I can have anything to say about it, to return.

If Germany can dominate the world by her learning, her industrial efficiency, and her. contributions to the peaceful art of civilization, I, for one, say God speed her. But when, reverting to the buccaneering period of history, she endeavors to impose her learning, her social efficiency, and her philosophy of life upon the rest of the world, as the Spanish Inquisition or as the New England theocrats attempted to impose virtue upon the rest of their world, I hope I have enough love of liberty to oppose her, as Carl Schurz opposed her in 1848.

This imposition by force of what she considers to be political and social virtue is exactly, it seems to me, the fundamental purpose of Germany in the present European war. I do not mean that the German people are conscious of this purpose; but that the German leaders are conscious of it I think there is no question. One of the pathetic things about the war is that the mass of the German people have been convinced by their military leaders that they are fighting to defend their hearths and homes. They had to be convinced that they were on the defensive in order that they might be persuaded to make war at all, for the mass of the German people are lovers of peace. But the leaders of modern Germany wish to dominate Europe-the militarists for power's sake, the industrialists for the sake of commerce, and the intellectuals for the sake of imposing German ideals upon the world. I shall give below my reasons for this assertion, but allow me first to say a word about the Kaiser.

I am not one of those who hold the Kaiser directly responsible for the present conflict. I think, however, that he is indirectly responsible because he has built and perfected a great German military machine which is holding all Europe at bay at the present moment with a skill and power that is at once the admiration and the despair of the rest of the world. The Kaiser himself is, or perhaps it would be more exact to say believes himself to be, a champion of peace. By heredity and by practice he is a sincere

A little over four years ago I had the good fortune to come in contact with him somewhat intimately under exceptional circumstances in Berlin. I saw him in his family circle; I sat at his table; I observed him near at hand at a great university function; I talked in informal intercourse with some of the most influential of his civil and military officers. I expected to see a man from whose mailed fist, iron will, and severe presence I should shrink. On the contrary, his open and friendly countenance, his kindly personality, and his lively interest in the human side of things greatly attracted me.

But in the military system of modern Germany, which he more than any other one man has developed, he has, like Frankenstein, built a gigantic being which got beyond him and which he could not control. Without wishing to be irreverent, I venture to say that last July he passed through his Garden of Gethsemane. The Kriegspartei which he created came to him and said, perhaps even in so many words, You must lead us, and with us a victorious Germany, or we shall override you. He yielded because he wished

to be still, as he has been in the past, the plumed knight of Germany. But I feel sure that he did not yield without some moments of bitter anguish. Here, I think, he made his great mistake-a mistake which history is likely to record as the greatest ever made by a ruling monarch possessing such a moral power over his loyal people as the Kaiser undoubtedly possesses. I still think that in those last days of July he could have said: Germany, Russia, France, England, Austria, and Italy will confer over the Servian question. He could have appealed from the Kriegspartei to his people, and the appeal would have been sustained. But he appealed to the arbitrament of war. If he had accepted the suggestion of a pourparler made by Sir Edward Grey, and if Russia had refused, had proceeded with her mobilization, had invaded East Prussia, and thus had really

and actually struck the first blow, I believe that the sympathies and support of the English-speaking world would have been with him and not against him, and that in the eventual combat his military position, to say nothing of his moral position, would have to-day been very nearly impregnable.

However, it is not what might have been but what is that I am discussing, and so I turn at last to the evidence that explains to me why almost the entire civilized world is arrayed in sympathy or action against the German nation to-day. It is not because of the alleged atrocities of the German soldiers. I know too well the accusations of atrocities made by the South against the North and the North against the South in our own Civil War to attach much importance to such accusations until they have been thoroughly sifted and weighed. It is not because of the invasion of Belgium, serious as that is. It is not because of the irreparable destruction of Louvain and the injury to the Cathedral of Rheims. These things fall into the category of symptoms of a much deeper, more fundamental, and more terrible error on the part of the ruling powers of Germany. It is the error of believing, as I said at the outset, that war is a glorious thing per se, and that one civilization can be imposed upon another civilization by the force of arms.

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War," says the historian Treitschke, "is politics par excellence. . . . Among all political sins the sin of feebleness is the most contemptible. It is the political sin against the Holy Ghost."

"Perpetual peace," said Moltke, "is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream. But war is a link in the divine system of the universe." "To us," says Professor Eucken, more than to any other nation, is intrusted the true structure of human existence."

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"We Hohenzollerns," said the Kaiser, "take our crown from God alone, and to God alone are we responsible in the fulfillment of duty."

"Our sovereigns," said Prince Bismarck, "have been of the absolute kind, but their absolutism aimed at benefiting the state and not themselves. From time to time they have even hanged members of the nobility so as to show that no one in Prussia may escape the law. . . . This doctrine the Hohenzollerns have never forgotten. They have all been brought up in this spirit, which has become part of their very being."

"In the German view," says Professor