whom he liked, irrespective of whether the Chamber liked them; just as the German Emperor chooses the German Imperial Chancellor without any regard to the Reichstag. As against this claim (which of course covers the vital difference between making Ministers responsible to the Crown and making them responsible to Parliament) the text of the existing Constitution is not as clear as it should be; and the Venizelists will probably want to amend it.

Whether Greece is ever to enter the war on our side should be left like the other issues, to an unfettered decision by the Greek people. It would be futile, as well as unjustifiable, to impose arbitrarily on the whole of Greece the war-policy of the Salonica Government. It is possible, of course, The New Statesman.

that the country will come in, at any rate when the Allied preponderance has become sufficient to deprive participation of all risk. But the fact must be faced that the Greeks of Old Greece are an exceedingly unwarlike people, and that, so far as the late King's policy "kept them out of the war," they emphatically preferred it to that. of M. Venizelos. Another difficulty would be that the officers of the Army, including nearly all the higher command and the indispensable framework for any large military organization, have been strongly Royalist and proGerman. Taking these points together, it seems unlikely in any event that Greek military participation could seriously affect the struggle in the Balkan theatre before the spring of 1918 at earliest.

The story of a brief but joyous and illuminating spiritual experience is vividly told in "Twenty Minutes of Reality" by Margaret Prescott Montague. The story was first published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly; and its publication drew forth letters from Atlantic readers recording similar experiences of their own. These letters and some others are included in the present book-all of them conveying a comforting assurance of the reality of things unseen. Houghton Mifflin

Co.

The central figure of J. D. Beresford's notable novel, "The Wonder,” is the prodigy, Victor Stott, the child of ignorant parents, brought up among uneducated people, endowed not only with marvelous gifts of memory and assimilation, but with equally marvelous logical and constructive powers, developing at the age of six months a theory of life, but deliberately with

holding its expression and obviously keeping his phenomenal possibilities in reserve. As readers of "Jacob Stahl" would expect, Mr. Beresford portrays with extraordinary cleverness the impression made by this infant genius on the doctor who assists at his birth, on his parents and neighbors, on the casual fellow-traveler, and, later, on the village squire, the clergyman and the visiting members of the Royal Society. The chapter describing Victor Stott's examination by the Local Education Board is delightful, but perhaps the author's imagination is at its subtlest when he pictures the relations between the Village Idiot and the Prodigy. Heredity plays an ingenious part in the plot, and the introduction of Ginger Stott, the cricketer, shows the variety of Mr. Beresford's talent. No one who enjoys the psychological or the weird should miss this fascinating book, which, by the way, is dedicated to Hugh Walpole. George H. Doran Co.

In "The Call of the Republic" Col. Jennings S. Wise presents ably the arguments, unanswerable to the mind of a professional soldier, for universal military training. He urges that two years be given by a large body of forcibly-conscripted young men, throughout the United States, to such service. These boys must start in at twenty, be kept in barracks and camps, and re-sent to such drillings after their compulsory attendance has expired. They should be selected by the states and communities. He prefaces this statement of policy by a history of military training, showing bitter dislike for the former English voluntary system, and vivid admiration for the German army methods. His enthusiasm leads him to statements concerning the ennobling results of barrack life with which Professor Ferrero is in plump contradiction, as is the author of "A Little Garrison Town." E. P. Dutton & Co.

Readers who hope to find Mr. Frank Swinnerton calling spades spades with unprecedented freedom and frequency in his latest novel, "The Chaste Wife," will lay it down with a grievance, for the story is really far more decorous and restrained than most of its school. To be sure, Stephen Moore, the struggling young writer for whom charming Priscilla Evandine leaves the comfortable home of her father-an "eminent critic" whose popularity has been achieved by platitudes-proves to be a husband with a "past," but it is so brief a "past" that it scarcely serves to class the book with "problem novels." Both Priscilla and Stephen are real and likable, and in the background is an unusually large and clearly drawn group of minor characters. The story fills four hundred closely-printed pages, and incidentally contains some clever discussion and satire of current tend

encies and fads. Mr. Swinnerton has marked talent, and his work for the next ten years will be watched with keen interest. But can it be that he is a romanticist at heart? How else could he make the Evandines, after giving their only daughter so cheerfully to so poor a match as Stephen, actually throw their only son in the way of Stephen's sister Dorothy? George H. Doran Co.

And now comes another Southern novelist to make Mr. Henry Sydnor Harrison look to his laurels. The same fascinating Southern atmosphere, the same deft mingling of pathos and humor, the same skilful individualization of a large group of characters, the same sympathy with modern social problems, the same delicacy of feeling, the same high, wholesome idealismMarie Conway Oemler's "Slippy Magee" might easily pass for an earlier work of the author of "V. V.'s Eyes." The title is not fortunate, except from the market point of view, for it suggests a crude sensationalism quite foreign to the book, but to have called it by its hero's later soubriquet, "The Butterfly Man," might have been equally misleading. Told by Father Armand Jean De Rancé, the last of an old New Orleans family, whom a tragic disappointment in love leads to a life of self-devotion among the factory folk of a South Carolina mill-town, the story is summed up in a sentence: "I caught a great burglar and hatched a great naturalist." But not even Father De Rancé's tact and patience could have achieved the transformation had not fate-or Providencedelivered Slippy Magee into his hands with one leg shattered by jumping from a train. Politics, economics and romance enrich the plot of a story which is sure to rank among the most successful of the season. The Century Co.

In a far larger sense than Shakespeare ever dreamed of, we are looking out on the horrific spectacle of the four corners of the world in arms. Now that the United States of America have become active participants in the great struggle, countries containing two-thirds of the population of the whole world are at war. The direct and personal interests of more than a thousand million souls are involved. Nor does this calculation include the four hundred million inhabitants of China, whose diplomatic relations with Germany have been broken off. Great and Greater Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, Roumania, Portugal, the United States, Belgium, Serbia and Egypt on the one hand, and Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria on the other, are at deadly grips. Only the South and Central American Republics, Spain, and some of the smaller European States, including, as has been officially announced, the microscopic Republic of San Marino, remain outside the fray, cultivating a neutrality advantageous alike to the skin and the pocket. It is a world-war in an almost complete sense of the term-a clash of interests and principles almost as tremendous and devastating as the collision of two worlds. If it be a platitude to say that nothing like it has been known in the course of mundane history, it is, nevertheless, a platitude of amazing significance. There have been costly wars and sanguinary wars and prolonged wars, but never has there been a war covering such enormous areas, involving so colossal an outlay, and darkened by such a wholesale sacrifice of human life. No words can describe, and no calculation can determine, the sum total of the grief, the misery, and the individual suffering

of the civil populations of those parts where the tide of battle has most furiously rolled. Nor is it possible to decide at this stage, since we do not know what the duration of the war will be, how much it will ultimately cost in military and naval expenditure, in the destruction of property, and in the economic value of the lives prematurely cut short. There are, however, data from which one can deduce more or less nearly the probable cost up to the completion of the third year of the conflict; and an examination of these particulars and of the conclusions to which they point reveals a story of which the arithmetic is more surprising in its tragic import every time it is looked at.

It may seem a hazardous enterprise to attempt the figuring out of this cost where so much is bound to be indefinite. In some ways it may be likened to the dubious labor of the schoolboy who is put to do "invisible sums on an imperceptible slate." But the task is not really as hopeless as it may appear at first sight. Nor is it as difficult now as it would have been in the earlier part of the war. "I do not think," said Mr. McKenna more than two years ago, "it is within the power of man to estimate what the cost would be if the war lasted thirty-six months." It has so far lasted thirty-four months, and the cost has exceeded by many thousands of millions the first crude estimates of departmental officials and club quidnuncs. When and how will this terrible expenditure cease? Armageddon expressed in the terms of millions sterling has only to go on long enough and it will threaten universal financial collapse. Already it has brought more than one small State to the verge of bankruptcy. Already the great Central Powers themselves are menaced with