tau, the foreign offices in London, Washington and Paris were consulted by the Okuma ministry. The result was a general understanding among the great powers concerned regarding what will be done with territory taken during the war. The well-informed Tokyo correspondent of the London Post tells us that, and the daily itself, in close touch with the British foreign office, confirms the statement editorially. "It is not at all likely that Japan would wish to cause undue apprehension among an already too suspicious people like the Australians by occupying permanently a group of islands just outside their back door." Since both the British and the Americans are likely to favor the opinion of Australia, Japan is disposed to avoid complications. "The English-speaking peoples will have to be reasonable with Japan, however, by doing what they can to assist her in the solution of her problem of immigration." In the past few years the rate of increase in the population of Japan has leaped to over a million a year. "The Anglo-Saxon peoples can not go on forever enforcing congestion of population upon Japan by rejecting her immigrants and at the same time refusing her the right to extend her territory." In such words does the inspired London organ put the case for Tokyo. Japan has done a great deal to help the allies in this war, it adds, and she hopes their gratitude will assume a practical shape.

Japanese Distrust of the Western Powers.

AS S THE electoral struggle draws nearer in Japan, there is a tendency among popular newspapers to apprehend and to suspect a betrayal of the national interests to the foreigner. Charges against Okuma and his advisers are circulated by politicians in control of provincial papers. London suspects the German press agent, who seems to pervade the far East just now. His hand is seen in China itself, where the vernacular dailies published in Peking have been anti-British for years. Japan and China both feel, in consequence, infers the London Times, something like a breeze of prejudice against the western world. Never were the masses of the Japanese so prone to suspect their rulers of betraying them to America and even to England. As regards China, indeed, few opportunities are lost, says the great daily just named, of impugning British good faith. "Delight has been expressed by responsible Chinese writers at the imagined decadence of England." The oriental campaign, this commentator says, has been promoted by German money. No skill on the part of Japanese statesmen could be too great to avert a serious situation when the freshly elected diet assembles. That is why the intervention of the Emperor himself may be necessary, for if a too spirited house of deputies comes to Tokyo, it will be dissolved. The trouble may bring about a compromize between the popular politicians and the clansmen, altho on this point the Paris Temps warns us that the Japanese crisis can not be set forth in terms of western electoral

experience. What the Japanese want, it thinks, is more military and naval power with less taxation.

Japanese World Policy and Chinese Opinion.

YUAN SHI KAI continues to regard the war in Europe as an opportunity to settle the destinies of China without reference to Japan. The dictator in Peking has been flatly defying the ministry in Tokyo, says a well-informed writer in the Paris Débats. There is no open breach. Yuan simply ignores the antiBritish campaign in the vernacular press, and he couples Japan with her European ally in his diplomacy. The most conspicuous of the Peking journals, the bi-lingual Jih Pao, said to be the most widely-read newspaper in the case thus: the Chinese capital and to be owned by natives, states.

"Will Britain explain her motive in inflicting the horrors of war upon us? Japan pleads the exigencies of the alliance with Britain as her excuse for attacking Tsing-tau. Japan boasts herself the England of the East. If the Japanese loot, the British are responsible. If they outrage and rape our women, Britain is responsible. Japan's antiGerman spirit is fostered by Britain. The latter and not

Japan is the ringleader. Because Britain hates Germany,

China is innocently involved. Hence our losses must be made good by the British and not Japan. We may doubtless count on Britain's paying the reckoning after the conclusion of peace! The question of our obtaining compensation does not depend upon the issue of the war. If Germany and Austria win, the allies will have to pay us directly, while if the latter win the day, Germany and Austria will have to pay them an indemnity, out of which our compensation will come.

The point of view of Yuan Shi Kai himself is infered by some British commentators to be expressed by these remarks of the Jih Pao on the subject of the violation of Chinese neutrality when Kiao-Chau was invaded:

"Who could have credited the possibility that England, who vaunts herself the pioneer of civilization, would commit an atrocity before, which a nation sunk in savagery would have shrunk, which a half-barbarous folk would have hastened to disclaim? But the savage deed is bruited abroad and its infamy can not be hid. Water spilt can not be picked up, and the tumult of criticism may only be stayed and the hope of the world satisfied by the payment of an indemnity to China. Otherwise England must be relegated outside the pale of civilization and will lose all claim to reproach Germany for infringing Belgian neutrality. If, then, Germany is held innocent of blame for this act, Belgium will have to blame England for her disappearance from the map. She must not reproach Germany for her destruction but must upbraid England for falsely claiming to be the champion of neutral States. It is Britain who has caused Belgium to stake her fate on a single hazard and it is Britain who must make good her losses. So let the British weigh the issues well and reflect that it will pay them best to compensate China, lest they forfeit a bigger sum to Belgium."

The statement that "5,000,000 immigrants will come from Europe in two years after the war" is reassuring. Many people had begun to fear there would not be that many people left in Europe when the war ends. Boston Traveler.

"The health of the American army is extremely good," says an official report. Well, yes, if you compare it to the health of other armies. Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

When Belgium gets ready to reestablish herself she ought to amend her flag by abolishing that yellow stripe in it. That's the only yellow Belgium has shown, and it doesn't seem appropriate.— Chicago Evening Post.

There is a plan under way to make the United States dollar the basis for world exchange. It has been already-matrimonially.N. Y. Evening Sun.

S

IN may be a hard taskmaster, as the moralists tell us; but how about a man's ideals? What harder taskmaster is there than these sometimes are? They drove St. Simeon Stylites to a life on top of a pillar, they drove Father Damien to a lepers' community, they drove Livingstone to a death in mid-Africa, they drove Peary to the North Pole, and now they have driven Thomas Mott Osborne to Sing Sing. Not that Mr. Osborne is to be classed among the saints and martyrs exactly; but the difference is one of degree rather than of kind. His ideals are not as cruel and exacting as some ideals have been, but they involve sacrifice, just the same. When a millionaire manufacturer leaves his home of luxury, when a popular clubman leaves his clubs, and goes to live as warden in one of the most notorious prisons in the land, with 1500 convicts to be responsible for, one recognizes the fact

that loyalty to ideals is not wholly confined to the martyrs and saints and missionaries, but may be existent in our own prosaic times and in any class. When Mr. Osborne went into the prison at Auburn, N. Y., for a week's experience in a cell, there was evident a disposition not to take such an event too seriously. Many a man has done the same sort of thing just to get a scoop for a newspaper or to win a bit of reputation as a detective or from the sheer love of adventure perhaps. To be sure, it was a fine thing to do, but after all it was over in a week and no very serious sacrifice was involved. Besides he got a great deal of publicity for it, and we Americans are very prone to discount a good deed which has so much press agency work done before and afterwards. But when later Mr. Osborne went in disguise to a road-camp of convicts and shared in the life there for another week, no effort whatever was made to get into

the limelight. And when a few weeks ago he accepted the appointment as warden of Sing Sing, to put his ideas of penal reform to the acid test of actual trial in the hardest place that could have been selected, where criticism is invited and heavy responsibility is incurred, one could not help recognizing the sincerity of the man and his fine loyalty to a sense of duty.

Thomas Mott Osborne has been more than once prominently suggested as a candidate for governor of New York. He was a candidate for lieutenantgovernor on an independent ticket as long ago as 26 years, when he was but thirty years old. He was mayor of Auburn ten years ago. He was for years a member of the Public Service Commission. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention of 1896, when Bryan was nominated for President; but he bolted the ticket and joined in the Gold Democratic movement. Ten years later he was a delegate to the Democratic State Convention at Buffalo and when Hearst was nominated for governor he bolted again and became the chairman of the executive committee of the Democratic League formed to fight the Murphy-Conners control of the party in the state. Bryan, Hearst and Roosevelt have all been the pet objects of his aversion, and he has taken no pains to conceal his feelings. He came of Republican antecedents, but he switched to the Democratic party in the ClevelandBlaine campaign and has never switched back. And whenever anyone in New York state begins to think about a movement of protest in the Democratic party, for any reason, the first man thought of for a leader is Osborne of Auburn. He is the acknowledged leader of the independent Demo

crats.

He is a handsome figure of a man. He measures a little less than six feet in height and tips the scales at about 190 pounds. "The shoulders are broad and muscular, the torso round, protuberant and powerful, the flanks and legs those of an athlete of splendid proportions." He is something of a boxer, a fairly zealous automobilist, a clubman, an amateur actor, an expert pianist, a traveler, a lecturer and an author. The people in Auburn, according to the N. Y. World, call him "the most human millionaire in the United

States." The harvester machinery plant which was established by his father is a successful establishment employing over 3000 men. With all these outlets for his energy-politics, business, literature (he is an L.H.D.) and art-one might have thought he could have been satisfied. But that prison in Auburn has seemed to haunt him for years. He couldn't get away from it. He saw its frowning walls when driving around Auburn. He heard tales of pathos and tragedy about its inmates. Gradually the question of penal reform grew to be the most urgent of all questions to him. His voluntary incarceration for a week was but a minor incident showing this interest. He had before that time become the chairman of the N. Y. State commission on prison reform, chairman of the national committee on prison labor, a vice-president of the Prison Association of New York. He had been studying prison methods in Europe. So it was no sudden impulse that took him into the Auburn prison as number 33,333. He had studied the subject from the outside for years. Now he wanted to know something of it from the inside. The convicts themselves seem to have looked upon his action not with the contempt they usually attach to the interest of sentimental outsiders but as the intervention of a savior. A pair of socks that he discarded when he left the prison have been cherished by two convicts that got possession of them as sacred mementoes. While he was in his cell he became the recipient, through the underground channels, of a large batch of communications from the other convicts, despite the fact that no such communications are allowed between the inmates of the prison. And when he left they started to raise, out of their prison wages of one and one-half cents a day, a fund of $300 to buy for him some token of their appreciation. He heard of that in time to stop it, but otherwise it would have been bought. The effect of his experience was not confined to the inmates of the prison either. The Prison's Aid League was

organized among citizens of Auburn for the purpose of visiting the convicts systematically, each member of the League taking a group of the convicts to look after, giving advice, helping them to get positions on parole, and generally extending a helping hand where it is needed. Gradually the League is extending itself into a state organization, to operate in all penal institutions.

Osborne was amazed, he says, at the amount of splendid courage, fine feeling and neighborly interest he found displayed by the inmates of the Auburn prison. There were, of course, a "considerable number" of degenerates and generally undesirable citizens; but he also saw much that was gracious, brave and splendid. But the system treats all in the same undiscriminating way. "It takes away from the convict his Own initiative and freedom of action and he becomes an irresponsible automaton. When he returns to the outside world, therefore, he finds he is unable to resume his own initiative and to be the guider of his own destinies. This accounts for so many men who leave prison and return as secondtermers." The first thing done with a convict, we are reminded, is to attempt to deprive him of the normal use of his sense of sight and of his power of speech.

"Attempting to get acquainted with my surroundings at my side and diagonally in back of me the first day, I was reprimanded for disregarding the rules. Not once in all the seven days' meals that I ate in the mess hall did I see the men at either side of me move their eyes or faces in my direction.

"Whenever my left-hand neighbor, a fine-looking and agreeable young fellow, with whom I became very warm friends, as he was 'trusty,' with the run of the gallery, wished to share with me his portion of sugar for porridge, he would simply pass it over to me, and utter 'sugar' in the softest undertones. In fact, to learn to speak without moving the lips, and to catch the sounds of words so uttered, is acquire. How unnatural this is, and how one of the first things a convict tries to it tends to repress every human instinct, it is unnecessary to say."

The system inevitably tends to make the punishment for small offenses as severe as for great ones. A man who talks in the shop and a man who takes a crowbar and tries to kill a keeper are both sent to the dungeon, which Mr. Osborne describes as "the innermost circle of Inferno." The system is not only cruel but ineffective and wasteful. The real sentimentalists, he insists, are those who cling to an old failure. It is to the theorists that we owe “the antiquated prison system which we have tolerated to the shame of humanity." Those who know the system and have quit theorizing about it are the ones who are insistent on change. There is not a single thing, so he says, at Sing Sing that is right. "You think slavery is abolished in this country. Come up to Sing Sing with me and see. What is slavery but being forced to work under inhuman conditions and for no pay? And that is just what prison labor is." The beginning of a real reform in the system, he thinks, is a prison farm instead of a medieval fortress. Some of the cells now are only three feet and four inches wide and frequently two prisoners have to occupy the same cell. They are damp, unventilated, unlighted, and the vermin cannot be kept out. "In them we are breeding tuberculosis so rapidly that it is really an unthinkable menace to the society into which the prisoners must some day, when released, return."

In his first month, warden Osborne has done something to make it easier for the convicts in matters of detail, such as giving them a few minutes after meals for smoking before going to the workshops, setting apart the best quarters in the dormitory for the prisoners who are afflicted with rheumatism, giving a moving-picture show in the chapel on a rainy Saturday afternoon. The result of his first month's administration was a wave of good conduct that amazed him and the keepers. The number of cases calling for discipline was reduced from 117 to 34, and all of the 34 cases were minor offenses.

from the temperamental rise and fall of the esthetic soul. His mind has the constancy of the man of action. He goes into the gulf of death as unterrified as that clear sprite whom Shelley glorified. Sir John French resembles the Ariels and the Pucks of Shakespearean drama and death has become but, a part of the beautiful dream of things. It is the spiritual note of the war itself.

The blend in Sir John French of poise and firmness with his characteristic optimism marked him out for his high command, says this commentator. The brilliant cavalry officer is rarely entrusted with the fate of a whole army. The task of the cavalryman, as the career of Early and of Sheridan revealed in our own Civil War, is mainly incidental. "His success comes from the impetuous rush of the spirit rather than from the steady glow of the mind." The originality of French lies in his combination of the momentary inspiration of the cavalry leaderor so Mr. Gardiner thinks-with the capacity to comprehend a vast and involved problem from a height. His first demonstration of his essential gifts occurred during the Boer War, when he executed his dangerous tactical designs before Colesberg. This operation has become classic to students of war in Europe. Then it was that French found himself. "During three months, by every art of finesse and bluff, by skill and mystification, by caution that changed suddenly to audacity and audacity that changed to caution, by delicate calculation of time, of material values and of moral factors, he held in check a force often as much as five times greater than his own, a force, moreover, commanded by leaders of the high quality of Delarey and De Wet."

A homiletic genius developed by French very early in life led his mother to decide that he must become a preacher. His father, the dashing Captain French, of Ripple Vale, Kent, happened to be in the navy at a time when social influence was all-powerful. Young John at the age of fourteen was put aboard the Britannia as a cadet, serving four troubled years. By the time he was twenty-two, John Denton Pinkstone French, a slim, stocky, voluble blond, got a commission in the hussars, where his horsemanship amazed the whole Nineteenth, the regiment to which he was assigned. His life was at first depressing. Bookish soldiers were despised. The element in which he found himself distrusted all intellectuality as a form of feminism. Nor was the staff of the regiment itself choice from the social point of view. The whole British army was suffering from dry rot and routine. "The military calling," as our authority explains, "was merely a phase of the sporting equipment of a gen

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tleman, and drill and maneuver were rather dull and perfunctory incidents in an otherwise agreeable mode of life, while anything like the serious study of the science of war marked a man out as a curiosity, if not as a downright vulgar fellow." Soldiering, in short, was a sport that could but be degraded by professionalism. The cavalry was valued for its spectacular qualities only.

French, to whom the technicalities of the art of war made an appeal like that of the brush stroke to Rembrandt, could not sink himself in the teas and fox hunts at home or the gymkhanas abroad. He was that somewhat unusual type, a British soldier who can think, a mind naturally restless. He was so human in his manner and so likable in his eccentricity that his effort

to familiarize his regiment with actual military science was forgiven as a personal peculiarity. He has not the grim aloofness of commanders like Wellington or Kitchener, we read likewise, nor does he cultivate the Napoleonic art of flattery. "But he is not inferior to any of these men in conveying that impression which is essential to the great general-the impression that he has the secret of victory in him." Sir John French creates this effect not by exhaling mystery and aloofness in the form of an atmosphere. He disseminates with word and manner the belief that he is normal, sane, balanced, that his mind is one of dry lights and sound judgments. He proves open to conviction. He has mastery without the flaw of vanity.

Until the Boer War faced the British

Empire with a crisis, Sir John French languished for lack of promotion. He was judged, on the whole, unsafe because of his reckless originality and unsound because of his departures from traditional military methods. The war office disliked his heretical theories regarding the use of cavalry. His suggestion to his men that they learn to fight afoot was one among many instances. He was passed over at a critical moment of his career by the late Duke of Cambridge, who could understand nothing about war unless Napoleon had endorsed it. Even the successes of Sir John French discredited him to the pedants of militarism, because those successes had been gained by means new and strange. He took gamblers' chances, or so the war of fice was told. For example, when placed at the head of the cavalry during practice maneuvers, he solved his problem and won against a theoretical enemy but his tactics were assailed as risky and well calculated to compromize the destiny of a battle in actual war. When the struggle with the Boers made capacity a first consideration with the war office in London, the appointment of French to high command was

refused because he was "inefficient in the field." He was a brilliant theorist with a pugnacious attitude to his supporters. Buller, however, had come into direct contact with French in the Egyptian command and he insisted upon naming his own cavalry leader.

One must not censure the pundits at the British war office for their hesitation over Sir John French. From a purely theoretical standpoint, the man is no soldier at all, because he is all personality. His science is too intuitive, too informed with the mood of the occasion, perhaps too reckless. As an example, Mr. Gardiner refers to the best-known but not the greatest of all the exploits of French-the relief of Kimberley. When French hurled his cavalry at the Boer lines he took risks which in maneuvers would have been denounced as fatal. By every theory of the text-books, he should have been destroyed. Instead, the fury, the momentum, the unanticipated nature of the act, carried him through the storm safely.

The whole soul of Sir John French is in that episode. His spirit is not that of the gambler but that of adventure itself and for this reason his bold

ness is never a bet upon a proposition but an intuitive perception of the chances in his favor. Sir John French conveys the same impression to the Parisian journalists who strive to explain him to admiring boulevards. Anybody can see, opines the Figaro, for instance, that Sir John French is in essentials Irish. He has the merry Irish eye, the merry Irish laugh, even the Irish brogue. His gesture is quick, nervous, eloquent. His word is ready. Not being a large man, he does not show his sixty-two years conspicuously. He shares the taste of the Duke of Wellington for cold meat and he is noted, too, we read, for a sweet tooth and a fondness for fiction. His favorite authors, our Paris contemporary is glad to record, are all French and if he had his way he would retire at once and spend his last years in the forest of Rambouillet. Nothing gives him more satisfaction than the fact that his name itself is French since his favorite authors, his favorite landscapes and his favorite viands are all French.

These details have placed him on a footing of great cordiality with Parisians of every prejudice.

A

LTHO he is now nearing his sixtieth year and in spite of a reaction against him in the mind of the Czar, it was a logical necessity, or so the European dailies assume, to entrust the destinies of Russia's great campaign to the Grand Duke Nicholas. He is the one man of genius in the Russian royal family to-day, unless the well-informed are agreed in misleading the world. He manifests this genius not only in the boldness of his strategy and the success with which he realizes its aims, but in that subtler influence of personality which moulds men and events. He has the piety of the genius, thinks the Paris Gaulois, its reverence and mystical tendencies, but he has its energy too and its decision of character. The spirit of reserve in Russia nowadays reflecting itself in official communications, is that of this Grand Duke, who, in spite of that, permits journalists to follow his forces with a freeIdom at which the French and British stand amazed. He is audacious in decision and rapid in thought. Behind him are years of the very hardest work. He spent his young manhood in poverty on remote frontiers. He acquired a mastery of his profession on its technical side which has made him the finest cavalry officer in Europe. He has never become the slave of vodka

or of ballet dancers in the traditional fashion of his family. His piety is no less striking than his stature, but those who study him at closest range select him as the Grand Duke who is least tinged with that western culture so dear to some types of Russians.

In temperament this most gifted of the Grand Dukes is conspicuously Slav, thinks a writer in the Rome Tribuna, for he has the fatalism, the poetical melancholy and the characteristic spirituality of the race. He has always distrusted that tendency of his countrymen in good society towards a servile adoption of western manners and methods tricked out in a mummery of western catchwords. These things are to him remote from the spirit of the race to which he belongs, the race of which he is to-day the greatest leader. His idea has always been that Holy Russia embodies a racial genius capable of developing best along lines of its own, spontaneously, organically, without the adventitious aid of outside culture. This attitude explains the reputation of the Grand Duke Nicholas as a reactionary, a reputation established the more firmly because his notorious piety is so traditional. He suggests in his whole policy that first Czar Nicholas who told the poet Pushkin that "morality, diligence and zeal are preferable to crude, artificial and material

ized education." The Grand Duke Nicholas is most a Slav, it seems, too, in his sense of personal unworthiness, his moods of prayerful remorse.

The features of the Grand Duke are cut with an exquisite definiteness, a veritably mathematical accuracy of proportion. The busts of him in the salons at Paris brought the sculptor under suspicion of having flattered the renowned original, but those who have gazed upon the face of the man will agree, says the Figaro, that it is one of the most "accurate" in Europe. A physiognomist would be struck at once, we read, by the ease with which the eyelid lifts itself to the shelter of the brow, by the clarity and alertness of the rounded eyeball, by the glinting iris and pupil. The aquiline nose is saved by its length-a pugnacious nose proclaiming the intellectual vigor that forbids its possessor to spend himself vainly. The lines from the nose to the corners of the lips spell decision. The mouth is one swift impression of lips meeting firmly, straightly, neither drooping nor ascending, for the soul they express is too sure of itself for fluctuations of temperament. The upper lip quivers only in speech, the characteristic of the orator, and the chin has a round development over the throat, which it supports instead of oppressing. The jaw balances the temple