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ters to Cassandra; for one in particular, which describes, if I remember aright, a certain Mrs. So-and-so who appeared at an assembly "the same as ever-pink husband, fat neck, plain daughters and all."

In this the commentator detects signs of impending shrewishness, and opines that the removal of Jane and her family to Bath came only just in time to avert that calamity. Dear Jane, how she would have laughed at such an idea! The same chronicler compares her humor with that of Dickens, to the disadvantage of the latter. But why Jane Austen and Dickens? The theory would seem to be worked out on much the same principle as that apparent in certain phrases with which we are familiar in the pages of Ollendorff: "The tooth-pick of the uncle is more valuable than the pincushion of the aunt." Jane Austen was quickwitted indeed, ready of tongue no doubt, and marvellously felicitous in her power of drawing a character by a mere stroke of the pen; but ill-natured -unkindly-satirical! One has but to glance at the pages of "Emma" to realize what she herself thought of such a fault.

Among all her heroines there is but one perhaps who is unsympatheticthe terribly sensible Eleanor Dashwood. Miss Austen has shown her wisdom in mating her with Edward Ferrers, who admires a fine country "because it unites beauty with utility," and who, looking upon a picturesque valley, remarks that "it must be dirty in winter." One feels a certain satisfaction in realizing that this couple finally settled down in a small parsonThe Academy.

age and never had more than five or six hundred a year.

Those endings of Jane's, how appropriate they are! How well one knows that everything will ultimately come right, and that all the couples will pair off in the most satisfactory manner possible. But this does not in the least spoil one's interest-one is curious till the very last chapter to know exactly how Jane will manage it, in what manner that deft hand of hers will remove obstacles and create stepping-stones. But she never leaves one in doubt. On the very first introduction of Mr. Elliot, though he is represented as a very pleasant and charming man, and, moreover, a person "of consequence," we are made to feel that Jane does not approve of him, and that Ann will never be persuaded into accepting him. In the same way we are not deceived when Catherine is ignominiously expelled from Northanger Abbey; and though she is but a poor parson's daughter, and the subsequent mention of her portion of three thousand pounds takes us somewhat by surprise, we are quite prepared to read on the last page: "Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang and everybody smiled."

It is the old story over again: the story familiar to nursery hearers, how Sister Ann did see somebody coming, and how the woodcutter came in time to prevent Red Riding Hood from being devoured by the Wolf. Perhaps that is why Jane Austen's company is so acceptable during an illness; for the sick, as I have said, have many traits of resemblance to the old, and the old have much in common with little children. M. E. Francis.

AMERICA AT THE CROSS-ROADS.

No one can visit the United States old optimism, of that buoyant, unreathese days without becoming conscious

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soning, but invigorating confidence that America, in Mr. Morley's phrase, will "pull through." They are questioning

themselves and their future and their institutions with an open-mindedness that a decade ago would have seemed well-nigh treasonable. They are beginning to wonder whether the great experiment is after all so great as it once appeared; or, rather, they are beginning to see that it is an experiment merely. Familiar ideals, established political and social systems, are being brought as never before to the touchstone of fact. The inadequacies of an eighteenth-century Constitution in the face of twentieth-century problems are daily impressing themselves upon the national comprehension. Economic and industrial developments, it is felt, have taken on an intricacy and a varied sweep that are slowly bringing the Constitution to a confusion of helplessness. More and more people are asking themselves whether the United States can any longer be called a democracy. More and more people are coming to see that under the forms of popular self-government, political equality has become the sport of "bosses" and economic equality the jest of a voracious plutocracy.., The Courts to an alarming degree are losing the confidence of the masses; the Senate has already lost it. The old parties, the old catch-words, are ceasing to attract. The people perceive their emptiness and are palpably tiring of them, as people always tire of political arrangements that have ceased to correspond either to the instincts of the human temperament or to the facts of economic conditions. Republicans and Democrats with their obsolete mummeries will soon mean less than nothing to a nation that is girding itself to wrest its liberties from the grip of organized wealth. That social protest which was the backbone of Bryanism has stripped itself of the currency heresies that cramped its progress and is now sweeping across the country, over all sections, and with an utter heedlessness of the traditional party di

visions.

Federated Labor, fired by the example of England, is abandoning its timid non-partisanship and preparing to plunge into politics as a class with distinct interests of its own to serve. In city, State and nation there is now but one issue-the struggle between equality and privilege.

President Roosevelt is aware of the danger. His whole policy, indeed, is one feverish effort to avert it. But it cannot, in his judgment, be averted by a mere maintenance of the status quo. That is the delusion of the Republican leaders in the Senate. They remind one curiously of the French nobility before the Revolution, not, indeed, in the graceful brilliancy of their social gifts, but in their supreme contentment, their blindness to what is coming, their unconsciousness that there can possibly be any need or any desire for change. If there is discontent, they say, it is Mr. Roosevelt who is primarily responsible for it. It was he who fomented, and in fact originated, the agitation against the Trusts. But for him the clamor for Government regulation of railway rates would never have arisen; and his eternal insistence upon the eternal platitudes of morality and justice, by encouraging the notion that he is the only honest man in Washington, and that whoever opposes him is a purchased tool of the plutocracy, has added fuel to the very fire he professes to be anxious to quench. Such, so far as we can gather, is the burden of the Republican complaint against the President, the complaint that high Toryism always and everywhere prefers against the Progressive Conservative. At Washington it is complicated and embittered both by Mr. Roosevelt's personality and by his tactics. The long fight over the Rate Bill has been neither shortened nor softened by that strain of imperative masterfulness which the President is temperamentally incapable of keeping out of his intercourse with individ

ual Senators. Still less has it been shortened or softened by his readiness, if the bulk of the Republicans turned against him, to throw himself upon the Democrats for assistance. The spectacle that has been visible these many months at Washington of a Republican President striving to pass a Radical measure by the help of Democratic votes and against the opposition of his own party leaders, aptly illustrates the present transitional stage of American politics and parties. In the end the President has scored a modified triumph. The Rate Bill has been passed by the Senate, and the concurrence of the House of Representatives in the amendments that have been added to it may almost be taken for granted. Mr. Roosevelt, therefore, has succeeded in clothing the Inter-State Commerce Commission, which is as much a Government department as the Board of Trade, with power to annul any rate made by an Inter-State railway and substitute therefor a rate made by itself. On the other hand, Mr. Roosevelt has not been able to secure for this substituted Commission-made rate an immediate effectiveness. The railway company may at once appeal against it in the Federal Circuit Courts, and the Courts may suspend its operation by injunction, pending a final adjudication of its "reasonableness" or otherwise. Government regulation of railway rates, subject to the broadest kind of judicial review, is, therefore, the measure of Mr. Roosevelt's victory.

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But whatever its practical value, the passage of the Rate Bill is a considerable step towards the policy for which Mr. Roosevelt has consistently stood. He has always urged that the Government must exercise some moderate, but real and tangible, supervision over the great corporations, trusts and monopolies. Inaction in the matter now means blind action hereafter. If the Government does not supervise the

railways to-day, the people will insist on its owning them in the future. Mr. Roosevelt believes neither in doing nothing nor in doing too much. The immobility of official Republicanism angers him more than anything else .because of its stupid blindness to the reaction it is inevitably provoking. But he is not a Socialist, nor does he believe in Government ownership. His rate Bill fairly represents his economic policy-a policy that, while proving to the masses that the plutocracy is not all powerful, is cautious in its assertion of popular control and aims at a readjustment, but by no means at a reversal, of the relations between the rights of capital and the rights of the people. No one, however, can have followed the debates in the Senate without perceiving that his policy squares neither with Republican views as such nor with Democratic views as such. The old formulæ of the parties had no bearing on or application to the Rate Bill. Those who were against it spoke the universal language of Conservatism; those who favored it did so not in the least as Democratsto Democrats of the Jeffersonian cast of thought, indeed, such an extension and centralization of the functions of government must be wholly repugnant —but simply as Radicals. Moreover it has been made clear that all the Republicans are not Conservatives nor all the Democrats Radicals, and that therefore the irruption of issues which appeal more to men's fundamental opinions about politics and society than to their party affiliations must hasten that process of regrouping on which both Republicans and Democrats are unconsciously embarked. Indeed it has been charged against Mr. Roosevelt that out of the wreckage of the old parties he is purposely seeking to construct a party of his own. We do not believe it, though our opinion is unshaken that the President's efforts to save the plu

tocracy at once from itself and from popular vengeance must inevitably lead to a re-alignment of existing parties. It does not however follow that Mr. Roosevelt will be the leader of either The Outlook.

of the two organizations that will ultimately evolve themselves. He is more likely to find himself and to be found by others not Radical enough for the one and too Radical for the other.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Mr. Heinmann, the London publisher, announces a new and complete edition of the works of Henrik Ibsen, in eleven volumes, edited by William Archer, who is also the translator of most of them.

Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. announce a new book by Rev. Charles F. Dole, entitled "The Spirit of Democracy," which is described as a clear and searching study of popular government. The book was published serially last winter in The Springfield Republican.

There is clearly a revival of interest in Trollope. Two American editions of his works are in course of publication: "Everyman's Library" gives a place to "Barchester Towers"; and an English publisher announces a new edition of the entire Barset series. Now why does not some publisher test the public with a good edition of Mrs. Oliphant's stories? Some of the best of them are wholly out of print, but their charm would certainly win for them a new generation of readers, if they were rightly presented.

The recent death of Dr. W. G. Blackie, of the Glasgow publishing firm of Blackie & Son, at the age of ninetyone, removes one of the best specimens of the old-fashioned type of publishers. Dr. Blackie was a man of fine taste, and had a remarkable linguistic faculty, being able to read German, French, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Norse, and Dutch, besides Latin and Greek.

He had studied at Leipsic and Jena, and derived his degree of Ph.D. from the latter university.

There has just been published a book by Mr. Lionel Decle, called "The New Russia." Mr. Decle is a distinguished traveller; he undertook one of the most remarkable journeys in South Africa ever successfully carried through, an account of which he published in his well-known volume "Three Years in Savage Africa." He was the first traveller to cross Africa from the Cape to the Nile, and also from the Cape to Cairo. The present volume is the result of a journey to Russia in the early part of this year.

Rex E. Beach's Klondike story, "The Spoilers," opens excitingly enough with a pretty girl flying from a Behring Sea steamer just quarantined for small-pox, and helped to the deck of another by two stalwart miners returning to the Klondike. Next comes the attempt of a daring rascal from the States, who holds a judge in his pay, to get possession of a group of mines by fictitious legal processes and take his fortune out of them before his claims can be disallowed. The manifestations of outraged public sentiment are vividly described, and the book makes a strong protest against moral wrong done in the guise of legal right. But in spite of the talent which it shows and the striking scenes which it contains, it must be classed as sensational, Harper & Bros.

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Wild Wheat. Chapter XV. Probation-Time. By M. E. Francis (To
be continued.)
LONGMAN'S MAGAZINE
Some Literary Recollections of a Golden Age. By Alexander
Innes Shand
SATURDAY REVIEW
The New Humility. By G. K. Chesterton INDEPENDENT REVIEW 102
Paudeen in the Woods. By W. M. Letts
TEMPLE BAR 106
Michael Davitt: A Personal Recollection. By Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

88

92

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SPEAKER 110

VIII.

The New Canada

OUTLOOK 115

IX.

Greek at the Universities. By Professor Robert Y. Tyrrell

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