or the Paris Débats is much mistaken. He seems to have shared the longing of his consort for a recognition of their eldest son as heir to the Hapsburg house. The Archduke and his wife had by vows upon the cross abandoned whatever claim their children can be presumed to have upon the ancient diadem. This renunciation was entered formally upon the statute books of the dynasty. In Austria it was a closed issue. In Hungary the Hapsburg dynastic code is not so definitely recognized. The parliament at Budapest passed, therefore, a statute excluding the children of the late Franz Ferdinand from their father's royal inheritance. These measures had not removed the uncertainties. A morganatic marriage is not a bar to the Hungarian throne, according to some jurisconsults in Budapest. The parliament in that city could at any time have repealed the law it made. The Pope had power to grant a dispensation from the vow taken by Francis Ferdinand, or so the Débats says. His assassination precluded a world of complications, according to the French daily. Austria would never have tolerated a son of the late Duchess of Hohenberg on the throne in Vienna, whatever Hungary might enact in Budapest. Not until recently had the unfortunate lady been given precedence immediately after the Archduchesses. Even then, according to the London Chronicle, there was an unpleasant episode at the English court, where this new distinction could not, for a mysterious reason, be recognized.

The Hapsburg Assassination as a Provocation to War.

DIPLOMATIC representations in Belgrade as a re

sult of the tracing of any plot against the late Archduke to that city must further embitter the Servians against the Austrians, fears the Paris Matin, altho the Vienna Neue Freie Presse discredits the notion that the tragedy could bring on war between Servia and the dual monarchy. "Sarajevo," declares the latter, however, "is doubtless the seat of a conspiracy and the successful assassins came from Belgrade." Suspicious, too, is the detail that those in the plot were so well supplied with money. The Vienna daily treats with contempt the insinuations in Servian dailies that those who murdered the late Archduke and his consort relieved the Hapsburg court circle of many embarrassments. As the details of the tragedy emerge more clearly this tendency to mutual accusation between Slav and Teuton grows quite definite. These and similar consequences of the assassination, however, could scarcely become serious, says the well-informed Manchester Guardian, unless the aged Emperor Francis Joseph were to fail to live long enough to allow excitement to die down. The peoples of Austria and the countries around it have still to become accustomed to the notion of the undisturbed succession of the new heir. The combination of Bourbon, Teutonic and Magyar elements creating an atmosphere of reaction around the youthful Archduke Charles Francis tends to create alarm among the forces that rallied around the late Francis Ferdinand. An expert view of the crisis impending is afforded in this study of it by one for whose capacity to speak our British contemporary vouches from first-hand knowledge:

S9

A SIMPLETON AND A PEASANT GIRL Such is the judgment of the disgruntled element in the dual monarchy upon the Archduke Charles Francis and the Princess Zita of Parma, respectively, who, by the tragedy of Sarajevo, emerge as the immediate sovereigns of Austria-Hungary when the venerable Emperor passes away.

"Should the accession of the new ruler be accompanied by any internal confusion or any apparent disunion between the different races and provinces which make up the Austrian Empire, there might easily be produced a situation similar to that which occurred in Turkey after the fall of Abdul Hamid-one which would invite the less scrupulous of the neighboring Powers to seize the advantage given them by internal dissension and to provoke a war which might have the gravest possible consequences... . .

"There is, in the second place, the danger of an attack by Servia, which would be attracted by the possibility of increasing its territory at the expense of the Slav provinces of Austria lying near to it. Finally, there is the more serious danger of a Russian attack, which if made would no doubt be participated in by Roumania. The great military preparations of Russia in the last few years have been directed solely to the possibility of a conflict with. Austria, a conflict which was averted at the time of the annexation of Bosnia by the prompt and decisive intervention of the German Emperor, but which many observers of new eastern affairs believe only to be postponed. It is to the possibility of this conflict that France owes its Three-Years-Service Law. The possibility hung as a vague menace over the defined disturbance in the Balkan War, and it might in the event of a change in the throne occurring before Austria has settled herself again become an immediate reality."

The great powers of Europe do not quite realize it as yet, but their number has been increased by one since George Fred Williams arrived on the scene.-N. Y. World.

The most pitiable spectacle of modern times is the man who has to borrow ten cents from his wife to contribute to the anti-suffrage movement.-Washington Post.

sumption of the latter in its comments on French affairs being, observes the former, all wrong. What France should aim at, says the Manchester daily, is a policy based upon a better understanding with Germany. The idea is fantastic, if we may trust the Kreuz-Zeitung, very near to the official circle surrounding Emperor William and speaking with almost the voice of Prussian militarism. We find it saying now:

"Altho it can not be disputed that President Poincaré in all he turns his attention to proves unfortunate, he has succeeded this time. He has managed to bring the Prime Minister, likewise the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Viviani, into the path of the presidential policy-the policy of an imperialistic tendency which must sooner or later of necessity lead Europe into war. He feeds French Jingoism with Russian hatred of Germany and devotes all his efforts to drawing England into a combination in which no party will be its own master."

-Paris Figaro

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refused to enter the lat

est combination. Europe. through the events of the month in France, faces a revival of militarism which, says his Humanité, threatens civilization itself. The one hope, he thinks, is united action by the Socialist groups now so strong in the parliament of France, Germany and Great Britain. He professes himself bewildered by the infatuation of British politicians for a triple entente of which militarist Russia is a member. To the London Chronicle he has conveyed, over his signature, these expressions of his opinion:

"This mad race of armaments is developing a revolutionary situation in France, as in other parts of Europe. Here we have a bad principle that is fast approaching its extreme consequences. Its ruinous action is reflected in the conduct of society, and the class that is most exploited is awakening to the consciousness that not only its own interests but the interests of humanity will be involved in the threatened uprising against militarism, a fact which will act as a spur to revolt.

"Not only is this so in France.

"The monstrous abuse of militarism will act as a supreme impulse in the days of the revolution which capitalism is gradually preparing throughout the world."

WITH the passage the other day in the Lords of the second reading of the bill to amend the Irish Home Rule act, an appeal to arms becomes the inevitable solution of the crisis facing the British cabinet. This statement, tho sensational and pessimistic, is the matured judgment of all the opposition organs. Liberal dailies are inclined to fear that Belfast has been so worked upon by the bellicose Sir Edward Carson that episodes of a regrettable kind may be "staged." "The government have had their last chance of preventing civil war by their own exertions and they have thrown it away." The sentence fairly typifies every utterance of the London Times, from which it is copied. The great daily sometimes wonders whether "even now" the people of England and of Scotland fully realize the present condition of affairs in Ireland. Its columns contain almost daily evidence of what it describes as "the passions that are rising and are increasingly difficult to check." The Ulster issue, it affirms, is for the moment ceasing to be one of politics and is drifting towards the domain of psychology. "It may very soon become a problem not of boundaries nor of time limits but of what masses of excited and exasperated people may do under certain circumstances." If some solution be not found, it predicts a resort to mob action in Ireland very soon and Prime Minister Asquith will wring his hands vainly over the ruin he has wrought.

THE

T

The Amending Irish Bill to Avert Civil War.

'HE plan by which the Asquith ministry hopes at this eleventh hour to avert the horrors of civil war in Ireland is dismissed furiously by the conservative London Post. The bill just brought in, it explains, is merely the Prime Minister's proposal of over three months ago to put into legislative form the trite suggestion that any Ulster county shall be at liberty to vote itself out of the Home Rule act for six years

and for six years only. Any county in Ulster can decide its fate, moreover, by a bare majority. An area thus excluded would send members to the British and not to the Irish House of Commons. The whole scheme was rejected by Ulster when suggested first by Mr. Asquith in March, says the Tory organ with indignation, and it is evidently put forward again now in order to befog the issue afresh. Sir Edward Carson expressed the view of Orangemen generally when he declared that he would be hanged straight away before he would keep a rope around his neck for six years.

Home-Rulers in Ireland Take Up Arms. INFURIATED by the revival of a plan to exclude

Ulster from the scope of Irish Home Rule, the extremists among John Redmond's followers have flown

to arms on the Belfast model. Ulster never drilled and maneuvered with such energy as is now displayed in Cork, in Dublin and in the south and west of Ireland. All the influence of Mr. Redmond failed in checking this latest development, which, as Conservative dailies in London admit, received a tremendous stimulus when

troduction of 35,000 rifles into Ulster was connived at by the British ministry. Hence the swift flying to arms in the south.

The Roman Catholic Army That Will Face the Orangemen.

their reluctance to march against Sir Edward Carson's "troops" in Ulster. "The kernel of the matter," as the Unionist London Telegraph admits, "is that from the moment in which it was known that the armed forces of the crown declined to be used as a political machine in Ireland, the existence of a military or semi-military body in the south and west of the island became of overwhelming importance and even a necessity." In no other way, as the Home Rulers thought, could a show of equality be maintained against Ulster. The Dublin Freeman's Journal, not originally enthusiastic over displays of militarism on the Belfast model, has revised its ideas on the whole subject. Irish priests, doubtful at first, are now neutral. All are arming.

Distrust of Mr. Asquith in Home-Rule Circles.

WHATEVER happens in Ulster during the next few

months, Prime Minister Asquith will not send the British army to enforce the Home Rule act. He learned a severe lesson on that point when the military magnates rebelled last March. This is not admitted in any Liberal organ in London, but it is hinted in patriotic papers in the south of Ireland. This con

viction put a new face upon the whole situation in Ireland from the standpoint of the Nationalist press. The National Volunteers, as the regiments in opposition to the Ulstermen are called, became of first importance. Fanatical Home Rulers seem to think that the rebellious British army officers had secret instructions from the cabinet in England. Mr. Asquith is said to wink at the importation of arms into Ulster and there are suspicions that he might connive at a descent of the Ulstermen upon the unarmed Home Rulers at a timely moment. Ridiculous as it may seem, admits the London Telegraph, many even of the most intelligent Home Rulers living just outside the Ulster frontier do credit the tales of this peril. They fear that the recent in

The

the prowess of his Ulstermen, he is warned by the Unionist London daily already mentioned that the Roman Catholic army rising in the south of Ireland may overwhelm him. Even the members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians were given permission, we read, to enroll themselves in the ranks of the Irish Volunteers. The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland-"ever ready to take the lead in an inevitable enterprize"bestowed an unhurried blessing. Mr. John Redmond, "seeing that the only chance of controlling the growing tendency was to adopt it lock, stock and barrel," took the militarists into the official fold of Home Rule. hurling defiance at Sir Edward Carson was deprecated organization of this great army for the sole purpose of from the beginning by .Mr. Redmond. He looks with consternation, it even seems, at the prospect of a sudden march on Ulster if the talk about exclusion be not incontinently dropped. "Ireland a unit"—that is the slogan of the volunteers who will make short work of "areas of exclusion," "time limits" and the various parliamentary devices suggested so recently in the House of Lords. This attitude is making the position of Mr. Redmond in London more and more delicate and difficult.

Bulletins from the Theater of
Civil War in Ireland.

ALL factions in Dublin look with confidence to the

results of Mr. Redmond's appeal to the Irish in the United States. "The people of Ireland," he wrote to President Michael J. Ryan of the United Irish League of America, "are faced by an armed force which threatens to stand between Ireland and the decision of parliament to give her liberty." Sympathizers in this country are understood to have supplied already funds that ought to strengthen the Irish Volunteers in meeting what Mr. Redmond terms an "audacious attempt of the British aristocracy and an Irish minority to put down by force the liberties of the Irish people." Now

A DIFFICULT ORDER

-London John Bull

Mr. Redmond, as the unfriendly London Telegraph admits, was literally driven into this, step. "But his action is only a palliative." So long as the Ulster Volunteers remain as a body to be reckoned with and the British Army in Ireland is an entirely neutral force, the need for the/ Nationalist the Volunteers will remain. "Every difficulty caused by a partition of Ireland will be regarded as an additional proof that the extremist Home Rulers were right and that Mr. Redmond was wrong." The course of Irish politics must, our contemporary fears, be directed by those who possess the confidence of the armed and disciplined Roman Catholics. No conceivable authority now or in the future will be capable of disbanding them. Ireland comes into view as a self-governing nation with a military spirit like Prussia's.

Can the Army in the South of Ireland Cancel the Army in the North?

THE HE happiest day of Sir Edward Carson's life, he has just said, will be that on which he orders a mobilization of the Orangemen for the defense of their rights and liberties. Nevertheless, the Liberal London News seems more convinced. than ever that Sir Erward Carson is playing his gigantic game of bluff on a greater scale than before. It objects to Lord Landsdowne's reference to the Roman Catholic army in the south as "a most serious complication" of the Irish problem. What he really meant, insists the Liberal organ, was that it had simplified matters. "The Irish Volunteers cancel out the Ulster Volunteers. They eliminate force from the discussion of the Home Rule question." This elimination. of force kills the plan of exclusion. There will, predicts the radical London Chronicle, be no exclusion. Indeed, as the Dublin Freeman's Journal in more ways than one has intimated of late, the result of Mr. Redmond's action in accepting responsibility for the army that sprang up in his ranks is that the party he leads could not accept the permanent exclusion of the whole or any part of Ulster from the Home Rule

93

of Ulster would exclude the whole province, it insists. The Unionist Irish Times thinks a way will yet be found out of the civil war, altho The Northern Whig, the Liberal-Unionist organ of northeast Ulster, insists that every Orangeman will reject the latest "worthless offer" by the Prime Minister. "If Mr. Asquith has spoken his last word," it says, "there is nothing between Ulster and civil war."

bill. The Cork Free Press, organ of William O'Brien, seems to read the situation in much that way; but it holds Mr. Redmond responsible for the mismanagement which has brought on this aspect of the crisis. From the Belfast Newsletter, mouthpiece of the Ulstermen in arms, we learn that the followers of Sir Edward Carson expect to do, to dare and to die for the covenant they signed and that "unless we are to regard Mr. Asquith's proposal as a first bid for peace" it would be preferable to fight the issue out on the bill as it stands. A referendum

-London Punch

Ireland Between Her

Two Armies.

RESH appeals for a gen

FRESH

eral election are heard above the din of the preparations for an appeal to arms in Ireland. How absurd, exclaims the Liberal Westminster Gazette (London), is this cry for a general election by a party in England which has no policy for Ireland when Ireland is the issue of the day! The Ulster Volunteers say they will have nothing less than the permanent exclusion of the whole of Ulster. The Irish. Volunteers say they will not have Ireland mutilated by the permanent exclusion of the whole or of any part of Ulster. This is the crux of the controversy as the Liberal organ sees it. It proceeds to elucidate the subject in the following terms:

"We have seen the Unionist Party gradually stiffened by the Ulster Volunteers to increase their demand from the exclusion of a part to the exclusion of the whole of Ulster; we now see a counter-pressure exercized upon the Government to prevent the permanent exclusion of any part of Ulster. It is equally futile for either party to complain that the other is coerced, for the plain fact patent to everyone is that both are coerced; and that, whichever way the balance of the British electorate might swing at a general election, either party, if it returned to power, would find itself up against the same problem, tho the parts might be reversed."

street but at Buckingham Palace, to say nothing of the residence of the American Ambassador in London. That diplomatist, it seems from the London organ of the militant cause, has greatly disappointed the followers of the Pankhursts by his lack of courage in defending the Americans who, from time to time, involve themselves with the London police by smashing windows and throwing stones. Meanwhile those officials continue their policy of "harrying" the militants, even seizing a house in Campden Hill Square which has been used as a headquarters of the Pankhursts since the raid on the Westminster premises. The militancy of the month includes besides disturbances in theaters the burning of