nent danger of an air invasion of the land, as some writers would have us believe. Our military men had known for some little time that a flight over the Bering Strait could be negotiated by HE Japanese army has 8 flying regiments and one airship corps, with the personnel of 479 officers, 631 non-commissioned officers, engineers, and mechanics, and 2,077 men; the total of 3,177. The First Regiment, composed of 2 fighting companies with 12 machines each, and the Second Regiment, of 2 reconnoitering companies with 9 machines each, are both stationed at Kagamigahara-24 fighters and 18 scout planes in all. The Third Regiment, of 3 fighting companies with 12 machines each, is at Yokkaichi. The Fourth Regiment, of 3 reconnoitering companies with 9 machines to each company, are based at Tachiarai. The Fifth Regiment, of 3 reconnoitering companies with 27 machines, is at Tachikawa, near Tokyo; the Sixth Regiment, of 3 reconnoitering companies with 27 machines, at Heijo in Chosen (Korea); the Seventh Regiment, of 2 bombing companies and one fighting company, at Tachikawa; the Eighth Regiment, of one bombing, one fighting, and one reconnoitering companies, at Tachiarai. The army air force is being constantly extended now under the sixyear expansion program, which started with the financial year 1925. The army has completed its drastic reduction work of completely wiping out four divisions-the Thirteenth, Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and the Eighteenth Divisions. It expected to save about 18,000,000 yen from this heroic surgery; instead it netted 16,000,000 yen. It is devoting a large portion of this sum to the expansion of its air force and for the purchase of new weapons which the great European War brought to the fore. In On June 1, 1925, the air service in the army was given an independent status among various branches of the army and placed on an equal footing with infantry, artillery, and so on. At the same time two bombing regiments were newly organized and added to the aerial force. addition to this, the six-year expansion program now being put through calls for one reconnoitering regiment, of three companies; one fighting regiment, also of three companies. This program, when completed, will practically double the personnel of the Japanese air service and raises it from 3,177 to 6,195 officers and men. many of the master pilots of the air, under favorable circumstances. The visit of the American fliers woke the whole nation of Nippon to a vivid sense of a new world they were living inthat was the one important thing they achieved, as far as Nippon was concerned the new régime in which the air counted as much as the sea or the land. Since their visit there has not been a sneer or a dissenting voice in the Imperial Diet for the Empire's expansion of her air services. The American fliers came to us in May, 1924. Within two short years the progress of Japanese aviation is as sensational as any yellowjournalists could wish. In July of that same eventful year of the air the Japanese navy had quite an experience. The old battleship Iwami was made a target to test the effect of an aerial bombing. Our navy went right ahead and made the arrangement to sink the battleship by a torpedo. Why? Simply because the naval authorities did not believe that any number of aerial bomb attacks could possibly sink a battleship even of the old-fashioned type of the Iwami. The air bombing was scheduled on the afternoon of July 9. And the naval authorities solemnly scheduled the sinking of the ship on the 10th. After the bombing and at 4:30 P.M., when the old battleship was actually sinking by the stern right in front of their eyes, a number of officers on the Observation Committee swore up and down that the ship could not be sunk. And this in the summer of 1924! In 1920 America saw the Indiana sunk by air bombs, and in 1921 the Iowa, the Alabama, and the ex-German Ostfriesland all go the same way by the same means. Colonel Mitchell made no particular state secret about them. Three, four years after the American tests our naval authorities were clothed in armorplated skepticism on the effect of air bombs. The old battleship Iwami disappeared completely by 5:30 P.M. that memorable afternoon of July 9, 1924. Our Navy Minister, they say, went out to see the sinking of the Iwami on the following day, the 10th, as scheduled. He did not see much. But our navy saw a new light that day. To it the air force was no longer a mere body of sublimated scouts. The really serious efforts for the expansion of the air service dates from that time; it represents the downright serious work of only two years. The remarkable thing about our aviation, therefore, is the rapidity of its growth. Our civil aviation is even younger than the army and navy services. On November 1, 1925, there were only 108 first and second class civilian pilots in Japan. To-day there are about 118. On November 1, last year, there were 73 civilian airplanes, but more than 26 of them were old machines handed down from the army and the navy, at a nominal price. Yet last year the Japanese fliers suc ceeded in making a rather brave gesture. They made the Tokyo-to-London flight in the Hatsukaze and the Kochikase a couple of made-in-Japan machines engined with 400 horse-power Ꭲ HE Japanese naval air service started in 1912, when a few navy officers, who had been sent abroad for study, came home after their American and European training. At the end of more than ten years after that, in 1923 (during which our navy had the three-year expansion program of 1920 for naval air service, and which was completed in March, 1923), her naval air service was composed of only nine fleets and one company called, politely enough, the Zeppelin corps. Each of the nine fleets had eight seaplanes. These are the figures given in any of the dependable reference works. But of course the navy had a much larger number of flying-boats of the F-5 type and a rather imposing collection of training planes, mostly Avros with 110 Le Rhone motors, and a large assortment of new machines brought out by the British mission to Japan for the purpose of testing them out, such as Blackburn "Swift" Torpedo Carrier, Supermarine "Seal" Amphibian Fleet Spotter, Vicker's "Viking" Spotter, as well as some of the types familiar to the fliers in the World War, such as SE-5a, D.H.-9, Martynside F-4, and so forth. The second expansion program of the naval air forces should have been completed by 1927, but was postponed to 1928, because of the earthquake disaster of 1923. When completed, this program would give to our naval force the following: At the Naval Air Base at Kasumigaura (about 40 miles from Tokyo) 7 fleets with 56 seaplanes and one tender squadron; at Yokosuka, the great naval station on the Tokyo Bay, 5 fleets with 40 machines and one Zeppelin corps; at the Sasebo Naval Station, 3 fleets with 24 machines; at Omura, 2 fleets with 16 machines. Seventeen fleets with 136 planes in all. And, in addition, there is to be established one airship and one balloon squadron. The machines used by the air force of Japan to-day to a large extent are the Avro 504 K. 504 L, the F-5 Salmson, Nieuport, and various types of the Japan-made planes, such as the single-seater fighter, 2-seater reconnaissance, and 2-seater torpedo carrier, all of the Mitsubishi-type and the Yokosuka-type seaplanes, as well as some of the Nakashima type. Lorraine-Dietrich-owned by one of the greatest newspapers in Japan, the Osaka "Asahi." The fliers, Abe and Kawachi, left the Yoyogi Field in Tokyo on July 25, 1925, and flew over the Japan Sea and Siberia, and made 9,656 kilometers to Moscow in 66 hours and 30 minutes, flying time. An achievement of considerable importance to the air annals of Nippon. Children's Books THE JAPANESE FAIRY BOOK. English by Yel Theodora Ozaki. $2.50. ton & Co., New York. The Book Table Rendered into Το It is a pity that we do not number among our infant prodigics a child book reviewer. On such a book as "The Japanese Fairy Book" an opinion by one of those for whom it is really written would be valuable. the aged eyes of criticism fairy tales are not what they used to be. However, here are the usual number of lovely princesses, wicked ogres, and brave lords, and, since fairies are much the same the world over, it is not surprising to find the Japanese counterparts of many Grimm and Andersen favorites. There is a modified Cinderella in "The Story of Princess Hase," and the box of "Urashima Taro, the Fisher Lad" is similar to Pandora's. The haunting beauty of this latter story caught the imagination of Lafcadio Hearn. How the gentle Urashima Taro rode on the back of a grateful tortoise to the Palace of the Dragon King of the Sea, what wonders befell him there, and the grievous result of his disobedience to his princess is a charming story, simply told. Many of these stories are written about wonderful days long past, when animals could and would talk. It is a delightful humor that puts words of wisdom in the mouths of rabbits and monkeys and loving-kindness in the heart of a crab. The story of "The Jelly Fish and the Monkey" gives a highly amusing reason why the poor fish is the boneless, pulpy mass he is to-day. There is a suggestion of Oriental cruelty when, in "The Farmer and the Badger," a noble avenging rabbit punishes a wily badger by anointing his burned back with red-pepper salve. "The Japanese Fairy Book" is a fascinating collection of Eastern make-believe. Its gayety and simplicity should endear it to many children of the West. Cowboys By THE COWBOY AND HIS INTERPRETERS. President Arthur in 1881 issued a manifesto to the cowboys, bidding them disperse quietly and return to their homes. There Edited by EDMUND PEARSON fall lists, who wish he had been more effec- Again there comes one with a book that Courtesy D. Appleton & Co. Here he of the literature of the West. To digress for a moment, it would be nice if a man of sufficient parts could be found to write that "epic of the cow-country" that people are talking of, now that From "The Japanese Fairy Book" Courtesy E. P. Dutton & Co. and Constable & Co. Set the Bundle of Grass on Fire barbed wire, high wages, and Argentine beef have closed the ranges. The cowboy was a laborer; his lot was manual labor of the dirtiest, most exhausting, and occasionally most cruel description; but he rode a horse, and for the reason that his head was that much higher than the heads of other men he must array himself in strange garments and talk a great deal of his superiority. This is true in degree of every mounted laborer, whether he be Mexican vaquero, Argentine gaucho, Hungarian csiko, or artillery corporal; but the American cow-puncher has talked himself into a place in the world's gallery of romantic characters-that gallery kept by all the children, where the crusader is, and the pirate, the captain of the frigate, and the Great Detective. The cowboy has become a part of romance, therefore we must respect him; but again it was not so long ago that he most emphatically existed, and Dallas Atlanta we must find people to preserve his world for us in all its details. A Dreiser could do it; he could tell us, not only what a round-up looked like, but what it smelled like, perhaps a little of the real talk of these people; not quite so much ballad singing, but maybe a hint of the continual silly obscenity of all lonely sex-starved men, be they Marines, construction gangmen, or hoboes. At all events, the only real fault with "The Cowboy and His Interpreters" is that it doesn't tell us anything that we don't know already. There are few of us who will be greatly surprised to learn that the ten-dollar-a-month cowboy seldom wore red-satin shirts or spent as much time affectionately kissing his horse as the movies would indicate. His songs, many of which are in this book, have been printed and reprinted before, and as for the details of a cowboy's equipment-the saddle, six In writing to the cbove advertiser please mention The shooter, Stetson, chaps, rope, and spursthese things are part of our National inheritance; they are as familiar to us as what Queen Marie had for breakfast. Fiction IOWA INTERIORS. By Ruth Suckow. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. $2.50. "Local color fiction" is snubbed and scorned by the present-day critics who accept the work of Ruth Suckow as of distinguished merit. Local color fiction belongs, Carl Van Doren has told us, to "a now moribund cult" which was freighted with sentimentality and tinctured with respectability. Miss Suckow, on the contrary, is approved as a realist and an ironist who conveys without illusion the barrenness, the grossness, and the commonplaceness of rural life. She is, and she does; but on her Iowa farmlands she is blood-kin to Rose Terry Cooke gathering huckleberries on her New England hills, to Mary Wilkins Freeman, and to Mary Murfree among her Tennessee mountains. Their sentimentality, their respectability, are simply part of the legend with which to-day's intelligentsia are investing all American life and letters prior to 1905. The bleak realism of Rose Terry Cooke's story "Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence," the delicate, detached irony of Mrs. Freeman's "New England Nun," are the same colors that we find on the palette from which Miss Suckow paints her "Iowa Interiors." Miss Suckow has published two novels, but her art is essentially that of the local colorist, and its best expression is episodic, through the short story. In her novels"Country People" and "The Odyssey of a Nice Girl"-the lack of strong or sustained plot structure, the enveloping detail of environment, give a sense of monotony that even the flesh-and-blood reality of her people does not overcome. But in her shorter work there is no such flattening. Here we have single episodes, genre studies focused on a central figure or a small group of figures, all complete, proportioned, sharing in or moved by some common experience. Seldom has a book received a more fitting title than has been bestowed upon this first collection of Miss Suckow's short stories. As always, her native State furnishes her, not with backgrounds alone, but with "interiors," using the word in a human and spiritual sense. For here we come to understand and feel the influences that have controlled the lives and molded the natures of the men and women in the run-down farmhouses set beside sun-steeped pastures or in the little hamlets with their willow trees and dusty streets. It is a round of unending farm toil, of village community life with its immense interrelationships, its bickerings and obstinacies. There are the old German settlements, still richly foreign in speech and living; the communities made up almost entirely of farmers of English birth and descent; the thriving towns, with their success and progress; the ubiquitous automobile; but even with wealth there is little change in the rooted life of the soil. One gains a sense of the perpetual flow of the generations-nothing new, after all, but endless, slightly varied repetitions; and one realizes that human relationships-not books, or plays, or "public events"-furnish the one undying spark that kindles human interest. There is no lightness in these episodes. Mostly they are somber; the dependence and the demands of old age, of poverty and failure after a lifetime of toil, are themes that recur constantly. The opening story, "A Start in Life," is quite unforgetable in its reflection of the awakening to reality of the little girl who leaves home for the first Outlook time to "work out;" curiously, for all its complete difference, it recalls Katharine Mansfield. All the stories are detached, cool, impersonal; but underneath their quiet surface, their detailed rendering of a pattern of life, there are pity and understanding. THE BENSON MURDER CASE. By S. S. Van Dine. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $2. This is confidently announced as "a Philo Vance story." Others are to follow with the same hero-sleuth-an accidental, unofficial, and superlatively clever assistant to a district attorney who incredibly endures his contemptuously friendly aid. We have an idea we shall prefer these prospective stories to the present one, since the amazing Philo, having been already introduced and his methods and peculiarities explained in detail and at length, is likely to be more taken for granted. There is a little too much of him and his psychological theories in "The Benson Murder Case." Nevertheless it is an engrossing mystery tale which almost lives up to the anticipations aroused by its jacket, cleverly adorned with a facsimile of a New York Police Department form, filled out exactly as this particular case, if it were real, would be filed for reference in the Index of Homicides. THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY. By Arthur Machen. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. $2.50. First published in 1888. Its distinguished author's second book. It is a collection of medieval tales in the manner of the "Heptameron;" a tour de force from a young man of twenty-three. Biography LETTERS OF LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. Edited by Grace Guiney, with a Preface by Agnes Repplier. 2 vols. Harper & Brothers, New York. $5. Louise Guiney was a true poet; a brave woman; a wit; a loyal American; a firm friend; and a good hater of sham and rascality. Also she was a devoted daughter of the Church of Rome, and withal a scholar and a lady. Her life, published a few years ago, made one admire her withcut reserve. These letters do not seem, to us, to increase that admiration. They are breathless, nervous, consciously "literary," rather overcharged with Latin and French tags, and a bit too much stuffed with the bones of her saints and martyrs. Unworthy heretic that we are, we could enjoy a little less hagiology. SOME NEW LETTERS AND WRITINGS OF LAFCADIO HEARN. Collected and edited by Sanki Ichikawa. Kenkyusha, Tokyo. Letters to friends, with a few literary fragments, written by Hearn in Japan, and chiefly while teaching at the Tokyo Imperial University. They have been piously collected by one of his associates and successors. SCRAPE and REFINISH YOUR FLOORS yourself This amazing little machine does all the heavy work-scrapes, sandpapers, refinishes-then keeps your floors in perfect condition forever after-costs but a fraction of one refinishing job. OT a mere shining up of the old homely surface, but an entirely new surface... applied after scraping off the old one. The cost is but a fraction of ordinary methods. . . much less than a floor contractor's charge. An amazing new machine which plugs into an electric light socket like a vacuum cleaner, and requires no more skill to operate, enables you to do the job yourself. It takes off completely the old varnish or shellac... sandpapers the floor to velvet smoothness... vigorously rubs in coats of wax... then polishes the wax to a lovely luster. The change in your floors astonishes you. They look like new. Not only that-but they stay that way, for the machine takes care of them forever after. A few minutes occasional polishing, an annual or semi-annual rewaxing (operations absurdly easy), and your floors become the constant envy and admiration of your friends. In addition, the Ponsell Floor Machine takes care of your other floors. It gives linoleum a luster surpassing anything you have ever known... a surface so immaculately smooth that dust and dirt have a hard time sticking to it. The machine scrubs tile, cement, or any other kind of floors as they never could be scrubbed by hand, and without the least splashing. We have branch offices in 24 cities ready to serve you. Upon request, we offer a FREE demonstration in your own home. Or if you are too far from our nearest branch, a 10-day FREE trial. But first write for a complete description of this marvelous little machine, and what it does. Tear off the coupon now as a reminder, and then mail to us. We promise you an answer promptly. For the 8th year! -a Cruise-Tour to Seventy delightful days of adventure AMERICAN EXPRESS 65 Broadway, New York, N. Y. Always Carry American Express Travelers Cheques "Immensely interesting "-Wm. Lyon Phelps Remembrance of Things Past By JOHN RAYMOND HOWARD ΑΝ N eighty-year life-story, of youth, education, travel, war-time, mining interests, journalism, and over fifty years of New York publishing-with personal memories of Fremont, Beecher, Mrs. Stowe, Grant, Greeley, Raymond. Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, John Lord, Abbott, Hillis, Joseph Jefferson Henry Irving, Charlotte Cushman, Gladstone, Robert and Mrs. Browning, and other notable folk. "Of particular historical interest."-N. Y. Sun. "Packed with memories we shall never willingly let die."-S. PARKES CADMAN, D.D. "A great refreshment and a delightful companion."-GEORGE A. GORDON, D.D. All Booksellers, $3.25. By mail, $3.40 THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY, NEW YORK From" Whitman," by Emory Holloway of three or four in England and America. Mr. Rogers's "The Magnificent Idler" is an informal story of the poet's life; it goes in little for dates, and hardly at all for literary criticism. It is exactly the book for the reader who will not care for the conventional biography. Professor Holloway's "Whitman" is also a handsome volume with new and interesting illustrations. It contains much new material (for instance, regarding Whitman's correspondence and acquaintance with Mrs. Gilchrist) and furnishes a full narrative of his life, from his beginnings as a writer, together with criticism and comment upon his work. There are long and valuable quotations from his letters. Art PRIMITIVE NEGRO SCULPTURE. By Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York. $6. Thirty years from now, when the cult of the hideous has vanished, the pictures in a book like this may be smilingly referred to as typical objects of admiration in the "cuckoo age in art." Poems SELECTED POEMS BY CARL SANDBURG. Edited by Rebecca West. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York. $2. First, there is a remarkable description of Chicago by Miss West-one of those essays in vigorous prose with which the traveled English writer loves to amaze his fellow-countrymen. Chicago is shown as a city of incredible contrasts-for the most part as an ante-chamber of hell. It is true in detail, and somehow remarkably false in total effect; such a description as Napoleon I might have given of London-a city Courtesy Alfred A. Knopf where men "box themselves to death" at "Smissfield," and beat their wives with broomsticks. Then follow Carl Sandburg's poems. Are they poems? Or bits of rankly strong prose, "set in gasps"? No matter; we agree to-day in calling them poems-perhaps in fear that somebody will call us "reactionary" if we do not. They are remarkable, and often magnificent, whatever they are. And sometimes they are too consciously strong; the palmary examples of the "sweat-and-hairy-chest school of literature." We like the manner in which he pays his respects to the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday, whom he greets in "To a Contemporary Bunk-Shooter." The opening lines are: You come along . . . tearing your shirt .. yelling about Jesus. Where do you get that stuff? What do you know about Jesus? THE TESTAMENTS OF FRANÇOIS VILLON. Translated by John Heron Lepper. Boni & Liveright, New York. First issued in an edition of 1,000 copies in 1924. This aims to be a complete work on Villon-nearly all the translations of all his poems. Following the versions by Mr. Lepper are translations by John Payne, Rosetti, Swinburne, Arthur Symons, and Ezra Pound. Criminology MURDER FOR PROFIT. By William Bolitho. Harper & Brothers, New York. $2.50. Rather learned and painstaking essays about certain murderers who have slain numbers of persons for the purpose of gain. The stories are included of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh; of Landru in In writing to the above advertisers please mention The Outlook 1 |