An investigation by a New York religious paper, Federation, graded the different religious bodies in this city with respect to the number of children per marriage in the following order: Jews (highest number), Roman Catholics, Protestant (orthodox), Protestant (liberal), Agnostic. A German sociological review states that 40 per cent. of the upper-class marriages in New York city are childless.

Looking at the situation as a whole, says Dr. Booth, there is good reason to think that the Protestant AngloSaxons are not only losing ground relatively, but must, at any rate in the

East and middle East, be suffering an actual decrease on a large scale, since the average fertility of each marriage in this section falls short of the four children requisite for maintenance of the stock.

In Canada, Dr. Booth compares a birth-rate in Roman Catholic Quebec of 37.2 and in Nova Scotia of 25.0 with the mainly Protestant provinces of Ontario, 22.6; Alberta, 23.5; Saskatchewan, 17.7; Manitoba, 15.9 and British Columbia, 14.9.

Dr. Booth, who is himself a Protestant, concludes that "modern Protestantism is now (in practice if not in

4I

theory) virtually identified with a very extreme type of Malthusianism, and that in consequence of this state of affairs it is being driven back in practically all the great centers of civilization, both in the old world and the new, while the cream of its human material is suffering gradual extinction. If Protestant thinkers are alive to the gravity of the situation, is it not time that they should ask themselves very seriously the question: Are we prepared to accept this extreme Malthusianism, this anxious and drastic restriction of the family, as the true ideal of Christian marriage?"

H

OW SHALL we appraise the sincere claim of each of the European nations at war that the welfare of future civilization depends upon its continued existence? The view that none of them is indispensable is forcefully expressed by Roland G. Usher, author of "Pan-Germanism" and professor of history at Washington University, St. Louis. He writes in The New Republic, a weekly review recently started by a group of editors associated with Herbert Croly. It is noteworthy that this commentator, like hosts of others who consider the war, is found at once to be dealing with religious and ethical values. He says:

“We find it personally a little difficult to concede to any of the nations the gift of prophecy and an ability to read the writing in the stars. Can we be absolutely positive that the future of the human race, let us say, depends upon the ruling of Asia, Africa, or South America by any European nation? In the face of the fact that every religious creed which has shown any strength in history has come out of Asia, can we believe that upon the direction of the occidental nations depends the spiritual progress of the human race? We find in Europe at present two different notions of administration; one called parliamentary government, and the other bureaucratic government. The one works admirably in England, and rather badly elsewhere; the other is astonishingly efficient in Germany, and less conspicuously useful in other countries. Shall we not really need the powers of a seventh son to tell which of these is more essential to the world at

large? We find in England a notion of individual liberty which, on the whole, allows the individual to do pretty much anything he wants to until some other individual sues him in court. The government is to arbitrate between the two, but is to direct neither. In Germany the government promulgates sets of rules regarding the conduct of individuals toward each other, and compels individuals to observe them. The citizens of both nations claim that the results are as nearly

OF CIVILIZATION?

ideal as anything is likely to be in this imperfect world."

possible for contemporaries to judge correctly in deciding whether resistance to aggression is really a safeguard for the future or merely an attempt of the obsolete and the outworn to retard progress. There can be absolutely no doubt, he says, "that the monasteries rendered indispensable service to the cause of civilization in the early middle ages, not only by the preservation of art and letters but by the preservation of technical skill in many mechanical trades. But in the sixteenth century the monastic orders had no “Indeed, educated men were pretty posi- ful to ward off destruction, and there friends sufficiently ardent and power

Looking into the past, it is difficult to concede to any generation the ability

to tell in advance what will benefit or will injure civilization. Greek culture was actually spread by the downfall of political Greece, and Professor Usher supposes that scarcely a Roman citizen could have been found in the fourth century, A. D., who would not have bewailed the invasions of the "barbarous" Germans as the death of civilization.

tive for nearly a thousand years that the Barbarians had destroyed civilization. Of this the Renaissance had no doubt whatever, and named the centuries subsequent to the fall of Rome and previous to their own time as the dark ages, when the light of civilization had been quenched. It is an astonishingly different notion of the Barbarian invasions which we find in the

pages of ardent Teutonists like Lamprecht

or Chamberlain. They are quite convinced that those centuries saw the dawn of civilization. In 1630 Gustavus Adolphus arrived in Germany for the purpose of saving civilization, which he identified with Protestantism, yet he succeeded (as most authorities are now agreed) in wrecking and desolating Germany, and he was certainly one of the chief authors of her poverty and weakness in the two succeeding centuries. Nor do we see at present eye to eye with the savior of civilization in 1815. Louis XVIII. and the Duke of Wellington now occupy quite unenviable positions as blind reactionaries in the path of progress, while for those masters of foreign politics, George Canning and Metternich, whose policies and speeches impressed their contemporaries as utterances divinely inspired, we have scarcely a respectful word. Yet in 1815 there was probably no individual whom his contemporaries would have considered sane who did not breathe fervent prayers of thanks in the belief that the future passed into the hands of its saviors.” of civilization was now assured, having

From history it also appears to Professor Usher that it is almost im

are not many students to-day who are inclined to question the general gain for civilization by the breaking of their power."

If there is anything in the tenet of the relativity of truth, declares Professor Usher, we have not now and are

not likely to have any notion of what is really indispensable to the future of civilization, because we have not and cannot have a definite notion of what the future of civilization is.

"It ought to be sufficient for us to remember that northwestern Europe, which we now look upon as the seat of civilization, was, at the birth of Christ, scarcely known to be upon the globe, and was in all honesty believed by scientists to be the place where the world came to an end and space began. And in the history of the race and of the world two thousand years are but a moment. In reality we are dealing to-day with essentially different notions of civilization, of its object, of the methods necessary to attain it, of the hands which will perform the work. It is the difference of opinion about the future which lies at the root of the present difficulty, and in that opinion we shall find, as in a looking-glass, the images of the nations as they successively step forward. They differ in their national character, their ideas of morality, their ideas of the future, because of their past. Their national aims and ambitions are the result of the history of Europe, the result of their deep hatreds, antagonisms and rival

ries during the fifteen hundred years since their ancestors poured down from the forests of the North upon the provinces of decadent Rome. From such a long and tangled past have come deeprooted ideas, intense passions, strong beliefs, determinations to prevail. It is with these we have to deal.

"Somehow, in some way of which we know nothing, the future civilization will emerge, as in the past, from the clash of these ideals and ambitions. The past makes it clear that civilization will be safeguarded, whatever happens. The future no more depends upon a single race or a single nation than a nation depends upon a single individual. When we talk of worlds, of aeons of time, of the human race itself and the future of its civilization,

nations, like individuals, become pygmies and almost disappear from sight. We

cannot tell in advance what the future is going to be, we cannot tell in advance which of us will render the service which will be seen a thousand years hence to have been important; but surely we can all be pardoned for believing that we have some part to play in it."

Professor Usher concludes that the real problem with which we have to deal is not that of providing for civilization's future, but that of providing for the immediate future of those of us who are now alive.

Viscount James Bryce, long British ambassador to the United States, has contributed to current war literature an ardent plea for the liberty, individuality and integrity of the small nations. Under the title "Neutral Nations and the War," this plea has been issued in pamphlet form by the Macmillan Company. History declares, says Mr. Bryce, that no nation, however great, is entitled to impose its type of civilization on others. "No race, not even the Teutonic or the Anglo-Saxon, is entitled to claim the leadership of humanity. Each people has in its time contributed something that was distinctively its own, and the world is far richer thereby than if any one race, however gifted, had established a permanent ascendancy. The world advances not, as the Bernhardi school suppose, only or even mainly by fighting. It advances mainly by thinking and by a process of reciprocal teaching and learning, by a continuous and unconscious cooperation of all its strongest and finest minds. Each race has something to give, each something to learn; and when their blood is blended the mixed stock may combine the gifts of both."

Mr. Bryce denies that the State is wiser or more righteous than the human beings of whom it consists, and whom it sets up to govern it; he denies that the strong Power is a moral law unto itself as against smailer and weaker States standing in the way. Among considerations which he thinks should appeal to men in all countries are these:

"The small states, whose absorption is now threatened, have been potent and useful-perhaps the most potent and usefulfactors in the advance of civilization. It is in them and by them that most of what is most precious in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in science, and in art has been produced.

"The first great thoughts that brought man into a true relation with God came from a tiny people, inhabiting a country smaller than Denmark. The religions of mighty Babylon and populous Egypt have vanished: the religion of Israel remains in its earlier as well as in that latter form which has overspread the world.

"The Greeks were a small people, not united in one great state, but scattered over coasts and among hills in petty city communities, each with its own life, slender in numbers, but eager, versatile, intense. They gave us the richest, the most varied, and the most stimulating of all literatures.

"When poetry and art reappeared, after the long night of the Dark Ages, their most splendid blossoms flowered in the small republics of Italy.

Owe

"In modern Europe what do we not to little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom 600 years ago, and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic monarchies held the rest of the European continent; and what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and her painters surpassing those of all other countries save Italy?

"So the small Scandinavian nations

have given to the world famous men of science, from Linnæus downward, poets like Tegner and Björnson, dauntless explorers like Fridthiof Nansen. England had, in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton, a population little larger than that of Bulgaria to-day. The United States, in the days of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Marshall, counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece.

"In the two most brilliant generations of German literature and thought, the age of Kant and Lessing and Goethe, of Hegel and Schiller and Fichte, there was

no real German State at all, but a con

geries of principalities and free cities, independent centers of intellectual life, in which letters and science produced a richer crop than the two succeeding generations have raised, just as Britain also, with eight times the population of the year 1600, has had no more Shakespeares or Miltons."

No notion is more palpably contradicted by history, continues Mr. Bryce, than that relied on by the school to which General Bernhardi belongs, that "culture"-literary, scientific, and artistic-flourishes best in great military

States.

"The decay of art and literature in the Roman world began just when Rome's military power had made that world one great and ordered State. The opposite view would be much nearer the truth; tho one must admit that no general theory regarding the relations of art and letters to governments and political conditions has ever yet been proved to be sound.

"The world is already too uniform, and is becoming more uniform every day. A few leading languages, a few forms of civilization, a few types of character, are spreading out from the seven or eight greatest States and extinguishing the weaker languages, forms, and types.

"Altho the great States are stronger and more populous, their peoples are not necessarily more gifted, and the extinction of the minor languages and types would be a misfortune for the world's future development."

We may not be able to arrest the forces which seem to be making for such extinction, but we certainly ought not to strengthen them, urges Mr. Bryce. "Rather we ought to maintain and defend the smaller States, and to favor the rise and growth of new peoples. Not merely because they were delivered from the tyranny of Sultans like Abdul Hamid did the intellect of Europe welcome the successively won liberations of Greece, Servia, Bulgaria. and Montenegro; it was also in the hope that those countries would in time develop out of their present crudeness new types of culture, new centers of productive intellectual life.”

What many Americans consider one of the most notable reviews of the fundamental issues involved in the great war, by ex-President Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard, in the New York Times, reaches the conclusion that the desirable outcomes of the war are:

"No world-empire for any race or na tion, no more 'subjects,' no executives, either permanent or temporary, with power to throw their fellow-countrymen into war, no secret diplomacy justifying the use for a profit of all the lies, concealments, deceptions, and ambuscades which are an inevitable part of war and assuming to commit nations on international questions, and no conscription armies that can be launched in war by executives without consulting independent representative assemblies. There should come out from this supreme convulsion a federated Europe, or a league of the freer nations, which should secure the smaller States against attack, prevent the larger from attempting domination, make sure that treaties and other international contracts shall be public and be respected until modified by mutual consent, and provide a safe basis for the limitations

and reduction of armaments on land and sea, no basis to be considered safe which could fail to secure the liberties of each and all the federated States against the attacks of any outsider or faithless member."

No one can see at present, Dr. Eliot admits, how such a consummation is to be brought about, but any one can see that this consummation is the only one which can satisfy lovers of liberty under law, and believers in the progress of mankind through loving service each to all and all to each.

P

EOPLE have rushed madly to war, explains Dr. Jacques Loeb, a distinguished biologist of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, quite as moths and crustaceans rush madly to light artificially produced. Among masses of people the introduction of such a phrase as "racial superiority" and "racial antipathy" acts like chemicals among crustaceans in reducing the degrees of freedom of the will to go except in one direction. Such an analogy is interesting, even if not wholly convincing when applied to human conduct, since it is drawn from the so-called theory of animal tropisms (the inherent tendency of a living thing to respond definitely to an external stimulus), developed in Dr. Loeb's "Mechanical Conception of Life," published by the University of Chicago Press. He writes in the New Review, an international Socialist publication, primarily for Socialists whose internationalism has gone to pieces in the present European war. He asks,

What induces the masses, even the Socialists, to become the dupes of the destructive minority elements, medievalists, armament mongers, industrial exploiters, military caste, vested interests, "rulers" and "statesmen"?

"Organisms differ in their conduct from a steam engine or any other machine by possessing a greater number of degrees of freedom. Under ordinary circumstances a swarm of certain small water crustaceans in a jar shows an apparently absolute freedom (strictly speaking, a limited number of degrees of freedom) in their movements; i. e., nobody would be able to predict the direction in which any of the individuals will move in the next moment. They are as 'free' and incalculable in their movements as human beings. If we put into such a jar, containing a swarm of these crustaceans, a trace of a weak acid, e. g., carbonated water, the picture changes in a few seconds. The whole mass of animals is filled with one will, all rush madly to the side of the dish from where the light comes. If the position of the dish in regard to the window is changed, the masses will rush again to the windowside of the dish. We can now predict precisely how each individual will act, the machine-character of their conduct is obvious. What has the carbonated water done to these animals? Has it destroyed their 'freedom of will'? Not exactly, since they never possessed it, but it has diminished the number of their degrees of freedom, by making their sensitiveness to light so preponderant that all the other agencies which are able to influence their motions are annihilated. All the animals can do now is to rush to the front'-from where the light comes."

OF THE WILL

animal will, according to Dr. Loeb, applies generally to the understanding of animal and human conduct. The reactions of the animals toward light are determined by the presence of a definite chemical substance; but so also are the other desires and actions of animals and human beings. It is perfectly mad for the crustaceans to rush to the light, but with carbonated water the water crustacean has no other choice but to rush to the light.

"It is worthy of nouce that these cases cannot be interpreted in the terms of the psychologist. We cannot say that it is passion' which dominates these animals, because the word 'passion' does not explain why they do not act in the opposite way. We do not know the specific nature of the active chemicals in all cases, but we know the nature of the chemical when we make the little crustaceans light-mad by carbonated water. It is surely not 'passion' which makes the crustaceans go to the light.

"We are still accustomed to speak of the blinding effect of passion in humans.' What happens in the case of the 'passion' or supreme 'emotions' of a human seems to be the setting free of definite chemical substances by some agency-e. g., those which cause the complex of reactions

called fear. Such substances often annihilate all degrees of freedom of action in the individual except in one direction or way. Humans with such a reduced number of degrees of freedom are 'mad' in the same sense of the word as the crustaceans in the above-mentioned experiment. The blinding effect of 'passion' is only a special case among the many in which the degrees of freedom of individuals are reduced.

"It is well known that we can arouse human beings by certain phrases, and it is possible that in some cases they influence human beings indirectly, inasmuch as the phrases lead to the secretion of certain substances in the body and that these substances arouse those physical alterations which are the symptoms of 'passion.' (But it is not necessary that the influence of phrases should in all cases be explained in this way.) Humans with such a reduced number of degrees of freedom of will can easily be led in that single direction which corresponds to the single degree of freedom left open to them."

43

to lead to opposition or even rebellion. The effective method of leadership consists in the reduction of the degrees of freedom of the masses from within.

"All great movements in history have been produced by the discovery of means by which all degrees of freedom but one were suppressed in human beings. The Crusaders furnish an example. They were rendered unfree by having their minds filled with the phrase of the liberation of the tomb of Christ. Church and Court historians have at all times glorified this condition of artificially produced insanity. The unanimity with which the Germans, French, and possibly Russians, rushed to the front has a similar basis."

Dr. Loeb then proceeds to denounce such false-light phrases as "glory," "territorial aggrandizement," "nationalism," "imperialism," and "race superiority," invented and developed to reduce natural degrees of freedom of will to the one mad desire of rushing to the front.

"The English apparently do not lend themselves as yet so easily to a complete annihilation of all degrees of freedom of will, and we actually notice the astonishing spectacle that they do not all rush to the front. But the Kiplings will per

severe.

"The attitude of the French and German Socialists has been a surprise to many. Closer analysis will show that we must judge them mildly, in spite of the irreparable harm they have done to the belief that through Socialism humanity will be freed from war. We have pointed out that the phrase used by the German (and in all probability also by the Russian) press is that this is a 'race war'Teutonism vs. Slavism. The Socialists had learned enough not to be deceived by the clamoring for expansion of trade: they were also probably prepared to resist a desire of the Nationalists for territorial expansion, but they had not yet recognized the danger of the phrase, 'racial superiority-it is indeed a mere phrase, unsupported by any scientific fact and contradicted by the laws of heredity.

"Talent and, in all appearance, moral qualities run in families and strains, independently of race. The hereditary characters are transmitted as a rule independently of each other, and with a black skin the highest talent and the highest moral powers may be combined, while a complete absence of both may accompany a white skin. As long as the Socialists worship at the shrine of 'racial antipathy' and 'racial superiority,' as many of them ac

unreliable factor in the progress of civilization. It is a great pity that the Socialists get their information on heredity— the laws of which have only become clear in the last decade-either from the older scientific literature or from purely literary writers who are also responsible for the ideas of racial superiority which dominate Germany to-day."

Dr. Loeb, after warning us of war danger in the “racial superiority" fetish regarding negroes or Japanese, concludes with an exhortation to the

workingmen, who in a war are the main dupes, to free themselves (by means of other tropisms, shall we say?) from the grip of the phrases

"racial superiority" and "racial antipathy," as they have freed themselves from the grip of manufactured imperialistic phrases.

S

IR OLIVER LODGE, the physicist who is president of the London Society of Psychical Research, has now declared his conviction "upon scientific evidence" that future existence is real, having himself conversed with friends who had passed away. The scientific evidence, as the New York World notes, is not yet proffered to the public, but such an opinion from an eminent man of science who speaks with more than "forty-parson power" will "command an attention which the entire faculty of a theological seminary could not inspire." Sir Oliver, in previous addresses before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, approached this subject by warning scientists that their methods of arriving at truth might not be the only ones. His latest declaration, in the opening address of "science week" at Browning Hall, Walworth, as cabled to American papers, reads:

"The mind works the body and not the body the mind. Once realize that consciousness is something greater and outside of the particular mechanism which it makes use of and you will understand that the survival of existence is the natural, the simplest thing.

"We ourselves are not limited to the few years that we live on this earth. We should go on without it; we should certainly continue to exist; we should certainly survive.

"Why do I say that? I say it on definite scientific grounds. I say it because I

know that certain friends of mine still exist, because I have talked to them.

"Communication is possible. One must obey the laws and find out the conditions. I do not say it is easy, but I say it is possible, and I have conversed with them as I could converse with any one in this audience.

"Now being scientific men, they have given proof that it is real, not an impersonation, not something emanating from myself. They have given definite proofs. Some of them are being published. Many are being withheld for a time, but will be published later.

"I tell you that it is so with all the strength and conviction I can musterthat it is so; that we do persist; that people still take an interest in things going on; that they still help us and know more about the things than we do and that they are able from time to time to communicate with us.

"I know that man is surrounded by other intelligences. If you once step beyond man there is no limit until you come

to the Infinite Intelligence Himself. Once having gone beyond man, you go on and must go on until you come to God.

"But it is no strange land to which I am leading you. The cosmos is one. We here on this planet are limited in certain ways and blind to much that is going on, but I tell you that we are surrounded by beings, working with us, cooperating and helping, such as people in visions have had some perception of, and that which religion tells us saints and angels are. That the Master Himself is helping us is, I believe, literally true."

Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian author, inimitably expresses his confident belief in the future life in the closing chapter of his new book, "The Unknown Guest." He gives that title to the mysterious force which has been called the subliminal self, consciousness, superior subconsciousness, or superior psychism. Regarding this unknown guest he asks:

"Does it really exist-this tragic and comical, evasive and unavoidable figure, which we make no claim to portray, but at most to divest of some of its shadows? It were rash to affirm it too loudly; but meanwhile, in the realms where we suppose it to reign, everything happens as tho it did exist. Do away with it, and you are obliged to people the world and to burden your life with a host of hypothetical and imaginary beings—gods, demigods, angels, demons, saints, discarnate spirits, shells, elementals, ethereal entities, interplanetary intelligences, and so on. Accept it, and all these phantoms, without disappearing--for they may very well continue to live in its shadow-become superfluous or accessory."

The great quarrel between the subconscious school and the spiritualists is based, in the main, Maeterlinck thinks, upon a misunderstanding.

"It is quite possible, and even very probable, that the dead are all around us, since it is impossible that the dead do not live. Our subconsciousness must mingle with all that does not die in them; and that which dies in them, or rather disperses and loses all its importance, is but the little consciousness accumulated on this earth and kept up until the last hour by the frail bonds of memory. In all those manifestations of our unknown guest it is our posthumous ego that already lives in us while we are still in the flesh and at moments joins that which does not die in those who have quitted their body. Then does the existence of our unknown guest presume the immortality of a part of our

selves? Can one possibly doubt it? Have you ever imagined that you would perish entirely? As for me, what I cannot conceive is the manner in which you would picture that total annihilation. But, if you cannot perish entirely, it is no less certain that those who came before you have not perished, either; and hence it is not altogether improbable that we may be able to discover them and communicate with them. In this wider sense, the spiritualistic theory is perfectly admissible; but what is not at all admissible is the narrow and pitiful interpretation which its exponents too often give it."

It is within ourselves, says Maeterlinck, in the silence and the darkness of our being, where it is ever in motion, guiding our destiny, that we should strive to surprise the mystery and discover it.

"I am not speaking only of the dreams, the presentiments, the vague intuitions, the

more or less brilliant inspirations which are so many more manifestations, specific, as it were, and analogous with those that have occupied us. There is another, a more secret and much more active existence, which we have scarcely begun to study and which is, if we descend to the bed-rock of truth, our only real existence. From the darkest corners of our ego it directs our veritable life, the one that is not to die, and pays no heed to our thought or to anything emanating from our reason, which believes that it guides our steps. It alone knows the long past that preceded our birth and the endless future that will follow our departure from this earth. It is itself that future and that past, all those from whom we have sprung and all those who will spring from us. It represents in the individual not only the species, but that which preceded it and that which will follow it; and it has

neither beginning nor end: that is why nothing touches it, nothing moves it which does not concern that which it represents."

That great figure, that new being, Maeterlinck observes, has been there in our darkness from all time, tho its awkward and extravagant actions, until recently attributed to the gods, to the demons, or to the dead, are only now asking for our serious attention.

"It has been likened to an immense block of which our personality is but a diminutive facet; to an iceberg, of which we see a few glistening prisms that represent our life, while nine-tenths of the enormous mass remain buried in the darkness of the sea. According to Sir Oliver Lodge, it is that part of our being that has not become carnate; according to Gustave

A

T the recent National Woman's Suffrage Convention in Chattanooga, Tenn., Miss Christabel Pankhurst, the English militant suffraget, cited the European war as "an instance of the danger and injustice of depriving women of the ballot." Women suffer, in the knowledge that they had not power to avert the war. The inference one is expected to draw is that if women had possessed the right to vote they might have prevented what men, with the right to vote, did not prevent. Moreover, various suffrage advocates predict an advance of the woman's movement as a result of the great war.

A different opinion is expressed at length by Dora Marsden, contributing editor of The Egoist, London, who says:

"The War-still the War-has brought the wordy contest about Women's Rights to an abrupt finish, and only a few sympathetic words remain to be spoken over the feminist corpse.. Two parties were quarreling about the validity of the one party's claim to 'rights,' and without any warning preliminaries both parties, with the rest of the world, stand spectators at a demonstration in the natural history of 'rights.' . . . In the countries at war the inhabitants are entitled to the rights of the inhabitants of Louvain, or to those of two aviators fighting in the air, i. e., to what they can get. Civil rights, as well as courtesy rights, circumstances have called in, pending a settlement of fundamental rights, the rights which tally with the arbitrament of might when exhaustion compels one body of combatants to ask for terms. Those terms will be the 'absolute right' at the moment of settlement, and will be the foundation and the ultimate authorization of all subsequent civil or permitted courtesy rights, both of which species of right those who control the armed forces of a community can abrogate whenever they see fit. . . .

"The great charters embodying new rights have all been given in response to actual or threatened insurrections in might -i. e., in spirit of those who desired them, and as such they fall into harmony with the spirit of the absolute rights actually established at the sword's point. Between such rights and the courtesy rights which men have conferred on women there is a swing almost to an opposite; a sweep of difference, bridged to a certain degree by what may be called 'bluffed rights' rights conferred by astute poli

IN EUROPE?

ticians with an eye to popular favor in response to agitations too utterly feeble ever to put their issue to the test of any tribunal other than that of words and intrigue. It is a highly pernicious process, because it misleads and subdues spirit, and it is to this increasing vogue of ultramodern political institutions that the Woman's Rights' agitation is largely due."

Reviewing the confusion of two brands of vote-seeking propaganda this

writer describes one as the instinct towards the emoluments and confused status which goes with "property," and

the other as the instinct towards the

self-responsibilities of "freedom" which means "power." The question is, she says, whether women have the power, the genuine self-supplying power, and not the bogus counterfeit of conferred

power.

"Every form of self-responsible power demands—not last, but first-capable physical self-defence. One might venture to say it would be impossible to find in these islands any 'advanced' woman who has not felt herself made into something of a fool by the unequivocal evidence as to the position of women presented by the war—not merely in the countries actually devastated by the war-but here in England. They find that they may busy themselves with efforts to assist their less 'protected' sisters towards maintenance: they may form an admiring audience: they may have the honor of being allowed to share in their country's defence by dint of knitting socks: or 'serve,' as one ungallant soldier put it, by providing one of the 'horrors of war' as a Red Cross Nurse. In the war-area itself, they form part, along with the rest of the property, of the spoils of the conquered. One cannot easily refrain from the inference that, tho they have weakened the pull of the old-womanly competence, the 'advanced women' have done very little in the way of furnishing the necessary foundations for its successor."

Both the "advanced" women and the "womanly" women, according to Dora Marsden, have sought to advance their of their mankind, but have differed status through the obliging acquiescence only as to the civil means used: "demand" or "courtesy." Whichever path, she says, "one takes in considering this question of womanly complementari

ness or secondariness, if one so chooses to call it, always the same conclusion is arrived at: an effectual assertion of physical force is the first essential to any successful digression from the normal womanly protected sphere. It is a blunt fact, with a none too attractive sound, and there will be few women who will care to give voice to it which silence, by the way, is more telling evidence of the amount of dis

tance which the 'movement' has traveled than fifty years of platform oratory."

"Whether the 'revolting' women will ever move on to the point of acquiring the elements of self-defensive and aggressive force depends on the extent to which the

ardor of ambition can survive the depressing effects of the present too realistic presentation of their actual position. In any case, the set of circumstance and environment are against it. For it, there is nothing but pride of temper; the same ferment, however, which has been responsible for the rising of every subordinate race and class. If Englishwomen elected to, there exists nothing in themselves to prevent them from being as good a fighting force as the Japanese, for instance: and that would do to be getting along with. What does prevent them is lack of desire, and therefore lack of initiative; consequently there is no apparent necessity to make a drive through that heavy inertia which the substantial triumphs of passive womanliness have fostered. They are accustomed to win success almost solely through wellutilized inertia, and the better they succeed as 'females,' the more encouraged they are to remain inert. The spur of necessity, occasionally, will overcome it; but, lacking that, there is nothing to urge them on, and everything to pull them back. Even status - women's status — lies that way. Ninety-nine out of every hundred women can better hope to improve their status by looking to their marriage chances than by 'carving a career.' Only a personal pride (out of the ordinary), and intelligence, and the unique something which sets straight for individual power, remains to count on. Their possession is rare enough, and even when possessed are to be exercized only if something quite as vital to women can be fitted in alongside. In exchanging the old competence for the new, no women can afford to forego that end which was the main objective of the old competence, and which this earlier proved so superlatively successful in attaining."