French with a German accent and welcomed the union of the German States brought about that union only too effectually by blundering into the war with Prussia. The liberticide who massacred 1200 liberals to make the coup d'état, and proscribed 30,000 others to consolidate it, mellowed into the liberal Emperor who patronized Free Trade, raised a statue to Cobden, and in his latter years reigned as a sort of constitutional monarch. What is one to make of a man guilty of this sort of inconsistency save to regard him as a sort of latter-day Rienzi, incapable of taking long and sober views, or a dreamy adventurer hypnotized by the sense of his destiny and of his star? This is more or less the view which the Cambridge historian takes of Louis.

The Making of the Western Mind, by F. Melian Stawell and F. S. Marvin. London: Methuen, 1923. 7s. 6d.

[Spectator]

A CAREFUL Compilation that aims at giving the general reader some idea of the history and development of European civilization. It is divided into four sections - ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern- - and in each section the history, religious, philosophical, and scientific thought, the arts and manners of the period under survey, are sketched for the benefit of those who like knowledge in tabloid form. The volume concludes with a chronological table, and also contains a number of illustrations of art and architecture.

Arthur, by Laurence Binyon. London: Heinemann, 1923. 6s.

[W. L. Courtney in the Daily Telegraph] THERE may be some depreciatory criticisms to be passed on Mr. Laurence Binyon's Arthur, and it is possible that to some readers the movement of the poem may seem stilted and heavy. But it is right to recognize, once for all, that it is a fine piece of work, nobly designed, and carried out with no little literary skill; that it also possesses a studied eloquence which in some passages strikes a note above mere rhetoric. It is the more necessary to insist on these points because few efforts of the same sustained loftiness and vigor are even attempted in the present day, still less presented with the same careful attention to grace and style.

The performance of Arthur at the Old Vic was the occasion for a storm of applause so genuine, so warmhearted, so unanimous, that Mr. Binyon might well feel that he was amply rewarded for

all his generous trouble, and that his tragedy came near to being a masterpiece. Unfortunately. it does not reach that level - it is rather i heroic enterprise in which success is nearly won a stately edifice built up, story by story, with patient and assiduous effort; a poem of which all men will speak with respect, and only a few will admire. Perhaps reminiscences of Tennyson's Idylls are a positive disadvantage to the later poet, especially because Mr. Binyon seem almost to challenge a comparison in the choice of his episodes. But the banquet scene, which stands at the centre of his drama, in which Mordred finds opportunity for his poisoned gibes and innuendoes, forms an original and most effective picture of the dissensions and rivalries of the Table Round.

The Lowery Road, by L. A. G. Strong. Oxford: Bernard Blackwell, 1923.

[Sunday Times]

To pass to The Lowery Road is to leave the great world for the country village; yet, as the author of The Shropshire Lad has shown us, life may pulse as fiercely in a village as anywhere, and, indeed, Mr. Strong has some pretensions to being to a corner of Devonshire what Mr. Housman is to another county. He is not a mere disciple of the latter, however, as appears, for example, from 'Lowery Cot.'

The poem 'Man's Way' has humor of a delightful subtlety, but it is in the more distinctively Devon poems that Mr. Strong is at his best.

[The poem 'Lowery Cot' appears on A Page of Verse.]

BOOKS ANNOUNCED

MASSON, ROSALINE. Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. London: W. & R. Chambers, 1923. This work is designed to be a companion volume to the recent publication, I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson. It is twenty years since Sir Graham Balfour wrote the best-known life of Stevenson, and new material has become available in the meantime.

PONSONBY, ARTHUR. English Diaries. London: Methuen, 1923. This is a collection of diaries, including in all one hundred and twenty, and ranging from Edward VI to the biologist whose diary was recently published under the name Barbellion. There are many entertaining diaries of obscure people and several private diaries never yet published. The editor has added an introduction upon diary-writing.

United States with a conscious and thought-out imperialist policy, pursuing a preëstablished course.'

AMERICA AND JAPAN IN CHINA

THE cancellation of the Ishii-Lansing agreement, by which the United States recognized Japan's special interest in China, is viewed with mixed feelings by the Japanese. Tokyo Asahi, a popular independent organ, believes the agreement was superseded by the Washington Conference treaties, and ought to have been cancelled when they were ratified. Kokumin, an imperialist organ, thinks that America has now deprived Japan of all such special interests as may stand in the way of her own activities in China. 'Japan's special position can be protected only by her own strength.' Chugai Shogyo, the leading commercial organ, attaches little importance to the old agreement, since it was a mere declaration of the aims and intentions of the two nations, and these aims do not depend on diplomatic statements. The cancellation is thus an empty formality more of a theatrical gesture than a positive act. This is also substantially the conclusion of the ultra-jingo journal Yorodzu, which asserts that Japan's special interests in China are not based upon scraps of paper and cannot be impaired by paper declarations.

While this diplomatic gesture, if such it be, was being made, a sharp conflict of interests arose between the two nations in China itself. In February 1918, the Chinese Naval Office made a contract with the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha for the erection of a wireless station near Peking, and in this connection granted that company what is alleged to be a thirty years' monopoly over radio communications in China.

Recently an American firm, the Federal Telegraph Company, contracted

with the Chinese Ministry of Communications for the construction of several high-power radio stations, to be owned and operated by the Chinese Government. The Japanese protested, and at the latest reports are attempting to block the construction of the first station to be erected by the Federal Company at Shanghai. In connection with the controversy it is pointed out that the station which the Japanese began building at Peking five years ago is not yet in working order, and that the British Marconi and a French radio company are apparently in league with the Mitsui Company in opposing the American enterprise.

But the crisscross of commercial and political rivalry in Asia does not form a consistent pattern. American capital is said to be flowing into Asia through Manchuria via Japanese channels, thereby building up a community of interest between our financiers and Japanese promoters in that continent. As a result, according to the Weekly Review of the Far East, America will be encouraged to look with disfavor upon any political move that would tend to disturb the present situation' — that is, to threaten Japan's economic control of Manchuria and its hinterland. Whenever Japanese enterprises in China are threatened, American bondholders will be disposed to say: 'Go easy, do not do anything that might endanger our investments.'

CADORNA AND FOCH

WHAT La Tribuna calls 'a legend begotten in France and propagated abroad by certain influences,' attributes the recovery of the Italian army after Caporetto, and its obstinate resistance upon the Piave, to the personal intervention of General Foch. An article in the Revue des deux Mondes first set forth this interpretation of the