sary. (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $3.75.)

This is an age of "Aids." First we had "First Aid to the Injured," and then many such books, as "First Aid to the Young Housekeeper," for instance. Of course we have many "aids to students. True, they are not all so labeled. One such may be found in "The Customs of Old England," by F. J. Snell. The book should be widely read. As does no formal history, it introduces us to the fundamental relations and to the basic principles of English social life in the Middle Ages. The treatment is all the more helpful because of its distinct division

into various departments, ecclesiastical, academic, judicial, urban, rural, domestic. The volume is at once learned and popular. (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $1.50.)

Who knows anything about those western Mediterranean islands, Majorca, Minorca, Iviça? And yet we ought to know something about them. Certainly we ought if they are as Mr. J. E. Crawford Flitch describes them in his pleasant " Mediterranean Moods." To his description of the Balearic Islands he also has something interesting to add about Sardinia. The text is made particularly practical by a worth-while appendix. (E. P. Dutton & Co., New York. $4.)

A "DIVINE PLAN"-TO EXPATRIATE TEN

MILLION AMERICANS

I note what The Outlook has to say with reference to lynching and justice to the Negro in the South. The article is well meant, but, unfortunately, like all such articles in Northern periodicals, it raises the combative instinct of the South, and the mind inadvertently recalls the Negro as having been the bitter bone of contention between the two sections. The Negro came to the South through the North, and there is a feeling in the South that the North was first to offend against him. Having sold him to us, the North freed him, and in doing so followed intuitively a plan hereinafter revealed. The burden laid upon us is being borne by the South with patience and a fuller insight into the exigencies of the situation than the North can possibly have; so, if at times we grow impatient and use brutal expedients, it is but the expression of an overwrought spirit seeking the easiest and right way to bear the burden; it does not prove our lack of a kindly interest in the welfare of the Negro race. The South and the North have a subconscious assurance that there is a hidden purpose in the coming of the Negro to us. The plan, as one conceives it, is that the Negro was divinely sent here to go through a school of practical experience, to be followed by education and return to Africa through the same route by which he came. His progress so far bears out this idea.

Having given him the practical experience and freed him, we are now educating him,

and as fast as we do so he treks back to Boston. When we, by the means of education, have transferred the black belt from South Carolina and Georgia to Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Northern States are going to become unbearably irritable toward their black immigrants and inflict injustice such as the South shall not brook; positions being changed, the South will insist that the Negro get justice in the North. Then, and not until then, shall we all see the foreordained plan and co-operate in returning the Negro, at his request, to his native land. The sooner, therefore, we educate the Negro, the sooner the injustice will cease and the South receive the blessings awaiting the fulfillment of the divine plan.

The South thinks it needs the Negro as a laborer, and would therefore have him uneducated. The North does not discern as yet the consequence of his coming, and wants him to come educated; thus the North is blindly advocating the plan, the South selfishly hindering. In the meantime the Negro is most assuredly on his way back home. And, when the time is ripe and the money and boats provided, an evangelist will bring to a high pitch the homing and religious tendencies of the Negro race, thereby getting an enthusiastic co-operation that will contagiously take every mother's son and daughter of them back to the land God gave them. There, educated, and no longer an irritating presence, good will and money will go over to them alike from the North and the South, and there should be no reason why, imitating their white preceptors, they should not have, after a time, a stable gov

ernment and be a progressive and a happy race, fulfilling a destiny long delayed. MAURY M. STAPLER, M.D.

Macon, Georgia.

RUSSIA AND THE JEWS

An article in The Outlook for July 1 last upon "The American Jew and the Russian Government" justly attributes to the Czar and his Government superior authority over the law. During the seven years of my incumbency as Secretary of our Embassy at St. Petersburg an American citizen who had long resided in Russia, where he was actively engaged in promoting the commerce between that country and our own upon a large scale, appealed to me, as chargé d'affaires, for protection against the machinations of a disreputable person in an attempt to blackmail him. An investigation of the case satisfied me that, while the person in question had brought suit upon the basis of a combination of facts which rendered the American citizen liable under Russian law, she had no equitable right to the money she was endeavoring to extort.

In a personal interview I brought the case to the attention of the Minister of Justice, pointing out to him the excellent standing of the defendant and the worthlessness of the claimant, admitting, however, the technical soundness of the claim. The Minister asked me what I desired should be done, to which I replied that I would like the whole proceedings quashed. My request was acceded to without further question.

By Russian law Jews are excluded from Siberia. The late Mr. James Jackson Jarves sent a Jewish servant to Siberia to study the languages of the aboriginal tribes of its littoral, at the same time writing to the Minister of Interior of Russia for permission for the Jew in question to enter the country under the circumstances, thus making the matter one of record. The request was refused, and every appeal of the Ambassador to the Minister was met with further refusal, on the ground that the case was one of record and that the law was the law. Upon the Ambassador's exercising his right of appeal to the Emperor, the Czar, by his supreme authority, overruled the law and allowed the Jew to enter Siberia.

I am of the same opinion as that expressed in the article I have mentioned in The Outlook, that any promise by the Russian Government of an amelioration of the conditions regarding admission of American Jews into Russia must be illusory. All Jews, American and other, are subject to the same restrictions in this respect, and no privileges of entry could be accorded to one which

did not apply to all. Our peculiar difficulty is one involving conflict of laws. Russian law requires that all persons entering the country shall be provided with a passport duly viséed by a qualified official of the Russian Government. Only certain categories of Jews are permitted to enter the country, and for this reason Russian Consuls ask the question in each case of application for the visé of a passport, "Is the applicant a Jew?" If he is, the applicant may still be given permission to enter Russia, but under certain restrictions, provided he belongs to one of the privileged categories.

The remedy for the Jewish question in Russia would seem to lie with the race itself, irrespective of nationality. The position of the Jews in the money market and Russia's well-known needs as a borrowing nation present a combination of conditions which only requires a fair and united attitude on the Jewish side to make it compelling in the attainment of their desires.

HERBERT H. D. PEIRCE.

WOMEN AND THE SUFFRAGE In The Outlook's editorial columns of August 5 appears an article calculated to have its readers believe that woman's suffrage has proved a failure in the States where adopted, and for this reason should not be advocated. But why would The Outlook have its readers believe woman's suffrage a failure? Because "the 'Ladies' Home Journal' reports testimonies from nearly a score of residents of Colorado, who agree in the statement that woman's suffrage has not, in its sixteen years of operation, improved politics in that State." But the readers of The Outlook will perhaps not accept such a conclusion for so small reason. They might just as well conclude that manhood suffrage is a failure, since it has not improved politics in its century and a half of operation.

Because a vast majority of women do not exercise their right of suffrage is no justification for denying them that right. There are tens of thousands of our best citizens among the men who seldom vote. But let these non-voting men see that their votes are needed to protect their liberties, and they exercise the right. Give women the right to vote, and they will use it when they see that by so doing they can better their governments.

A nation's stage of enlightenment may well be determined by the rights and liberties allowed its women. The progressive spirit has worked for ages in lifting woman from a state of slavery toward an equal place with man. Lastly comes the ballot, and with it absolute equality. It may be

hard for us to get out of the last ditch and acknowledge the woman's right to vote, but the time will soon be here when we must. The new spirit of progressiveness which has taken hold of American politics will certainly send our wives and mothers to the ballot-box within the next decade.

JAMES M. RICHARDSON.

Fountain Inn, South Carolina.

[To impose on women a burden which they are unwilling to assume, and call it giving them a right, appears to us a misuse of terms. THE EDITORS.]

WOMAN SUFFRAGE ON TRIAL

To some of your readers it was not a little surprising to find on the same page with your excellent and liberal-spirited editorial paragraph on "The Awakening of the Turkish Woman" a reactionary statement of the "Result of Woman's Suffrage." In the interests of justice perhaps you will allow me to say a few words in answer to the latter.

In the first place, the majority of people are always indifferent to all reforms. The majority of slaves, for instance, were notoriously indifferent to emancipation, a considerable number even are known to have been content with their lot, and only an exceedingly small minority were in earnest in striving for freedom. Did this make emancipation any less necessary and right? Or, if you object that this parallel is farfetched, perhaps you will admit that the majority of the laboring classes-not the earnest and intelligent minority in trade unions, but the great mass of skilled and unskilled laborers-are indifferent to the evils of child labor. Does this make legislation against children's work seem to thoughtful people any the less desirable? Such considerations, and others like them, should give pause to those who hastily assume the necessity of general assent among women to their political enfranchise

ment.

Perhaps it would be fair to mention, after your note on the anti-suffrage petition to Parliament, that over £100,000 has been raised by one suffrage society alone in Great Britain within an incredibly short time, and is being used as a campaign fund; that public opinion in the islands, as shown by the recommendations of municipal councils and by the recent large majority in the Commons for the Suffrage Bill now before the House, is overwhelmingly in favor of votes for women; that Mr. Asquith, in a recent letter to Sir Edward Grey, has definitely pledged the Government to pass the aforementioned bill in the present Parliament; and that, finally, to set off against the 53,000

names gathered from all over the United Kingdom and signed to the petition you cite, the most conservative estimate gives 40,000 as the number of women who marched in last month's pageant in support of this bill. When you consider how much more effort and courage it takes to walk for miles through London streets than to sign a petition, when you further consider that the 40,000 women who did so march represent those suffragists in London alone who were able to give time and strength to the demonstration-then the 53,000 signers of the petition do not line up so portentously. For all the facts I have just stated, facts so significant for democracy, I have searched your columns of English news in vain.

As to Colorado, perhaps the verdict of a casual visitor to the State eight years ago, when the women there had been enfranchised for only five years, is negligible by this time, or at least should be revised to date. Such a revision your readers would find in an article by Judge Ben Lindsey in the February, 1911, number of the "Delineator." In this paper the author lists no less than twenty-six excellent laws passed in the thirteen years of woman suffrage in the State, laws which he considers are due to the women voters. Moreover, any one who read of the hearing of the Suffrage Bill before the New York Legislature last winter, and who remembers how Judge Lindsey, in a two-hour speech, refuted, point by point, the superficial inaccuracies in Mr. Richard Barry's anti-suffrage article in the "Ladies' Home Journal," will possibly hesitate to condemn the experiment in Colorado as an absolute failure. Should the testimony of one citizen, even of so eminent and just a man as the "children's Judge," seem inadequate, let me refer you to the results of the questionnaire sent by the late Julia Ward Howe shortly before her death to all the Protestant ministers in four suffrage States, asking for their unbiased opinion as to the effects of the feminine votes. Out of the very large number of answers, some four hundred in all, the great majority were enthusiastically favorable to the unlimited franchise, a small number thought there had been no great change in politics for better or for worse, a very few-I regret that I have not the exact figures here-said they had discovered a few bad effects. Most suffragists would, I am sure, be willing to grant that thirteen years is too short a time for any reform to prove its absolute value, but most would add that within that time some valuable results must have been made apparent, else five other States-neighbors to those already enfranchised-would not be

on the point of submitting a woman suffrage amendment to the people. In California the question is to be submitted in October; Kansas, Illinois, and Wisconsin are almost as nearly ready. But this, again, is a matter on which the newspapers bear witness. WINIFRED SMITH.

Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

PROHIBITION IN MAINE

A correspondent in The Outlook of August 5 erred in several statements, I think. "There is not a preacher,” said he, "who has a parish in our State, and scarcely a church member who has any intelligence on the subject, who is not opposed to the removal of the Amendment." I have talked with two-thirds of the thousand or so clergymen in Maine, and estimate that about seventy-five of them and about ten per cent of the church members are opposed to prohibition.

This writer says, "Every newspaper except five Democratic papers . . . are with us in favor of retaining our law in the Constitution." Six daily newspapers and thirtyeight weekly papers are in favor of prohibition, while five daily papers and thirteen weekly papers are opposed to prohibition. Two daily papers and about half a dozen weekly papers are silent on that subject.

"More than three hundred towns in Maine," he adds, "have never seen an open saloon, and the law is well enforced, with the exception of five or six cities." I possess about one hundred photographs of Maine bar-room interiors, and have considerable knowledge of the liquor business throughout the State. Saloons are conducted now in about seven of our twenty cities, and in about ten of our twelve hundred villages. Also there is considerable surreptitious selling of liquor in our towns, and more open vending at hunting camps and along remote tote-roads.

The impression is conveyed that there are no attractive bars in Maine. In Portland, Bangor, and Rockland I have seen a few bar-rooms which must have cost one thousand dollars each for interior furnishings. It is true that Maine bar-rooms are usually inexpensive and repulsive establishments. In 1901 the United States revenue record showed that 1,493 parties paid the United States liquor tax in 239 cities and villages. In 1907 these figures had been reduced to 719 United States liquor taxpayers in 106 cities and villages, and that is about the present number. Nearly one-third of these pay the tax for the sale of non-intoxicating beer.

The writer correctly states that the better citizens of Maine generally indorse the princi

ple of State-wide prohibition. When our liquor law is enforced, it is beneficial and popular, and the law is well enforced in possibly nine-tenths of our towns. At various times it has been enforced, with popular approval, in all our cities; thus proving that the inherent defect is not in the law, but in the officials and sitizens. I have talked incognito with scores of liquor-sellers, and have met only one who preferred prohibition to any form of license. I have heard that a few of the 140 wholesale liquor dealers in Boston (Bonfort's Directory, pp. 71–75), who have established a mail order business in Maine, prefer prohibition in this State.

HENRY N. PRINGLE,

Superintendent of the Christian Civic League of Maine. Waterville, Maine.

MORMONISM AGAIN

May I express a word of protest against the article in your issue of July 29 written by a Methodist minister, giving his view of Mormonism? For years I have been a constant and appreciative reader of The Outlook and have turned to it as a wise and safe leader in almost all questions that make for the uplift of its many readers. But I feel that I must voice, not only my disappointment, but that of many others, in what seems, at least, a lack of your usual judgment in allowing such an article to appear under your sanction. For, although you have given in an editorial a mild antidote, I am sure that your experience confirms the statement that there are only too many readers and publishers who will take the poison and never see or print the antidote. In proof of this you can refer to the issue of the Philadelphia "Public Ledger " of Sunday, July 30, where the article by Mr. Fisher is given in full, with prominent headings-leaving, therefore, with many the thought that The Outlook stands for Mormonism. S. C. COLLINS.

Minnewaska, New York.

[It is our well-settled principle to give in our contributors' columns views quite contrary to our own, provided that they are honest and sincere. The article referred to came from a Methodist minister in good standing, and is of interest, and, we think, of value in forming an intelligent judgment respecting the present character and condition of the Mormon Church. Of course our policy-it is more than a policy, it is a principle-of allowing various sides of great questions to be presented in our pages renders us liable to just such misinterpretation of our position as that mentioned in the above letter. But in the long run truth is made clear.-THE EDITORS.]

Many newspapers throughout the country are giving their readers lessons in the history of fifty years ago, in the shape of accounts of battles and incidents of the Civil War on their fiftieth anniversary. The illustrations that usually accompany these articles, taken from contemporary photographs and woodcuts, give the reader something of that feeling of living in bygone times that one gets when turning the leaves of a forgotten album.

The British Admiralty has paid nearly thirty-five thousand dollars in costs and compensation for dismissing a cadet from the Royal Naval College at Osborne on charges, of which he was innocent, of having stolen and cashed a postal order for five shillings belonging to a fellow-cadet. This case shines in contrast with many experiences of innocent sufferers by an error of justice, whose smart is allowed only the insufficient balm of being "pardoned" out of prison.

The age of chivalry has been revived in an unexpected place. To a New York City police captain is due the credit. He has decreed that women and children are to have the preference in getting seats on the Brooklyn Bridge trolley cars during the rush hours. Men are no longer permitted to jump on the footboard of the cars, crowd into the seats, take out their papers, and comfortably read the news of the day, innocently unconscious of the fact that women and children who got into the car a fraction of a second too late are standing in front of them, hanging on to the straps. Now if that police captain would only get after the companies and make them run more cars!

Among the many indications that China has really awakened is the holding of the first secular National Educational Conference, which was in session in Peking during July. The missionaries have before now held national educational conferences, but this Conference was composed of representatives of the Imperial schools. Compulsory education, military drill, mixed courses for boys and girls, and the abolition of the queue and of the Chinese classics, were among the topics discussed.

The story about the grasshopper plague quoted by the Spectator in The Outlook recently is criticised by the "Nebraska State Journal," which says that "no Nebraska farmer ever bragged about six acres of corn."

The "Journal" forgets that the day of small things was not despised by the pioneer, and that stories, like everything else, grow fast in the West. Its correction of "sixty" acres destroyed during the dinner hour will probably, in a rapidly growing State like Nebraska, become "six hundred" before the "Journal" celebrates its jubilee.

Europe has experienced almost unprecedentedly hot weather this summer. Not for seventy-seven years has Berlin recorded such high temperature as on August 14-ninety-seven degrees in the shade. Paris and London have also suffered. But American tourists abroad usually smile when told that the weather is unprecedentedly hot, and remember the record hot days in New York, Boston, and Chicago-to say nothing of Death Valley !

Colonel W. F. Cody, better known as "Buffalo Bill," who has familiarized the world with the " Wild West" as it was in its palmy days, is making his farewell tour in the professional saddle. Colonel Cody is almost the sole survivor of the famous scouts who helped to open the Great West in the days when the region "beyond the Mississippi" was the home of the Indian, the buffalo, the prospector, and the romance

writer-though the last was oftener seen in the vicinity of the offices of the "Ledger " and the "New York Weekly" than on the Plains.

Charlotte, North Carolina, famous as the birthplace of the Mecklenburg Declaration of 1775, is also the home of an enterprising newspaper, the Charlotte "Observer." It recently published a 100-page issue devoted to the description of the manufacturing and commercial advantages of the city, which has 34,000 inhabitants and is the center of an interurban railway system three hundred miles long.

"The Choctaw is the richest Indian in the world," said V. M. Locke, Jr., Governor of the Choctaw Nation, as reported in the Washington "Post." "There are approximately 23,000 Choctaws in Oklahoma, 9,000 of whom are full bloods. It has been estimated that every one of the Choctaws is worth about $5,000. This is in cash and interest in the lands owned in common by the Indians. Outside of the land that has been allotted to the members of the Choctaw Nation there are more than a million acres of land in the public domain owned by the Choctaw Indians, for which these Indians will be paid when the land is sold."

Baseball games and open-air concerts are to be a feature of prison life in the United States penitentiary at Atlanta, Georgia. Warden Moyer, of the prison, has introduced these recreations with the approval of the Department of Justice. The National game will be played by teams and witnessed by spectators who have won the privilege by good behavior.

The new ocean liner Aquitania, which is being built at Clydebank, Scotland, will be the largest in the world. She will be 900 feet long-10 feet longer than the German liner Imperator, which will be ready for service in the spring of 1914-and will accommodate 4,000 passengers. She will have a rival, in passengercarrying capacity at least, in the new steamboat Washington Irving, projected by the Hudson River Day Line, which will carry 6,000 passengers.

Thirty thousand persons are said to have been rendered homeless by the recent fire in Constantinople. No great city, probably, has been more devastated by fire than Constantinople. Some one his calculated that, on an average, a conflagration has occurred in that city every twenty-five years during its history. And yet its great Church of St. Sophia-which became a mosque in 1453, when the Turks captured Constantinople-has thus far escaped, and it was built in the sixth century.

The puzzle contests which have lately been a feature in so many newspapers, and which have caused the burning of midnight oil in most unexpected places, have produced a new business venture that strikes us as peculiarly unscrupulous. A company proposes to do the guessing and to get the prize for you! All you have to do is to forward fifty cents to the puzzle solvers, cut the coupon each day from the paper, receive all the answers by mail from the puzzle experts, send them in to the paper, and draw your prize. How simple, satisfactory, and-dishonorable!

The best remedy for rowdyism on railway trains, so the Birmingham (Alabama) “Ledger" declares, is in the suppression of the liquor traffic. In a symposium of the experiences of railway conductors which it prints, one of them says that formerly a frequent question asked of him by passengers fearing disorder was, "Are there many drunken men in the smoker?" The question, he says, is asked no more, and has not been since the saloon was abolished.