German army landed here, and to see Ireland treated as Belgium has been?

"Ah, they would never do the like o' that here! Sure, they're not that sort o' people at all," is the obstinate reply.

Is anyone surprised at this? Let him remember that the ignorant and the unprincipled always believe whatever they wish to believe, that their invincible instinct is to join the side that is going to win, that as long as they can remember they have seen crime and outrage successful in Ireland, and loyalty penalized and discredited as if it were a crime.

Blackwood's Magazine.

Is it too late to ask of England now to show her strength, in which these rebels do not believe, to do justice and punish the wrong-doers who have openly boasted that she is afraid to punish them, to give us order and law, and save our beloved Ireland even now at the last hour?

Is it possible that the English people are still unaware that Germany is here, that her money has furnished the sinews of this Rebellion, that the Sinn Feiners were counting on German promises?-kept in the German fashion, as the event proved.

Moira O'Neill.

Several weeks ago the English Association held a conference to discuss the effect of the war on the production and reading of books. They had secured some interesting speakers. The authors were represented, as they always should be when they can, by a poet, Mr. de la Mare; teachers and taught had Mr. Mais, of Sherborne, to speak for them; Mr. Buchan spoke for the publishers and Mr. J. G. Wilson for the booksellers. None of them wasted his opportunity, and the result was extremely interesting and on the whole a very encouraging discussion.

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When the war broke out Mr. Gosse, and a great many other people, thought it would make an end of literature. It seemed likely that there would be much less reading of any kind and that what there was would be almost entirely of newspapers and of the kind of books that are newspapers in all but name and shape. Almost the exact reverse has occurred according to the unimpeachable witness of the English Association. It is true that, according to Mr. Wilson, the sale of a few too celebrated novelists has almost ceased;

but this does not disturb Mr. Wilson, nor will it greatly disturb anybody except the too celebrated ones themselves and perhaps their publishers. On the whole, the report is most consoling. Both Mr. Buchan and Mr. Wilson express their belief that there never was a time when more books of the best sort were being read in England, especially if we include that greater England which is now in France. Of course, there is a lot of rubbish read both at home and in the trenches. But there is nothing new about that; it has nothing to do with the war. What is now and has to do with the war is the demand for the best books, and especially for poetry. And all the evidence goes to show that it is due to two things: the long hours of waiting which are inevitably the soldier's lot and the heightened sense of values brought about by seeing life, liberty, and country daily at stake before all eyes. The unaccustomed idleness makes a demand for quantity, the new vision and the tension of spirit one for quality.

Some curious information was given by the speakers both as to the general

fact of the demand and as to particular features of it. Of course, the war at first stopped the sale of books of any kind. The note in Mr. Wilson's diary during the first week or two was that no one seemed to want any books at all. Then gradually a revival began, and it is interesting to be told that it showed itself first in towns which were either munition centers or had large camps near them. There were difficulties for the bookseller. Nearly everything that was on his shelves before the war had become of no account. The capital invested in it was dead. But the immense sales of certain books about the war like Bernhardi's and Cramb's began to provide compensations. And after a while a general demand, which Mr. Wilson described as "simply marvelous," sprang up for many kinds of the best books, provided they were cheap. "There never was a time," he said, "when so many good books were sold." "I believe," said Mr. Buchan, "that more books and better books are being read today than ever before." The manager of a bookstall told Mr. Wilson that his difficulty was not selling cheap editions of books, but getting them to sell; they were always running out. This immense activity, which surprised the trade as much as everybody else, is explained as due chiefly to four causes. First there is the fact that modern war is a very slow and monotonous business, so that the soldier now gets more time for reading in a month than he got in a year under the old conditions. Then the modern army is a totally different thing from any we have ever had before. Both officers and men have been largely drawn from classes far more interested in books than the officers or men of the old Regular Army commonly were. Then there is the melancholy fact that there are always a large number of men in hospitals, and the bridle of Theages is still, as always, one of the most frequent and effective ways of making

men remember that they have minds as well as bodies. Then, as a fourth cause, there has been the condition of the civilian population at home. The immense majority have had much more money to spend than before and fewer ways of spending it. There were no longer any cheap tickets to tempt people to travel, and the dark streets made them disinclined to venture out again after they had once found their way home. The result was that the new quietness of the evenings and the Sundays provided a harvest for the booksellers. Thus the whirligig of circumstance brings about its surprises; and this time of unexampled stress and strain is seen, in fact, to have produced a revival of leisure.

Must its effects disappear when the war comes to an end? Mr. Buchan, whose numerous and many-sided activities make him a strange prophet of leisure, is sanguine enough to think they need not. He hopes that we shall not revert after the war to the restless habits which made life a thing of "fringes and oddments" and altogether destroyed the leisure which, as he justly insists, is necessary for the reading as well as for the production of good literature. He thinks the omens are favorable to a belief that the new and enlarged reading public will not disappear with the return of peace. Let us hope he will prove right. And if it retains in easier days the fine choice it is, on the whole, showing today, that will not be the least of the strange blessings, quite unconnected with the map of Europe, which this war is unexpectedly and indirectly working out for the people of this country.

Those who have been reading during the last few weeks Lady Granville's interesting volumes of the correspondence of Lady Bessborough, Lord Granville Leveson Gower, and their circle will have been struck by their constant allusions to the best literature. The

Latin, Italian, French and English poets, great historians like Clarendon, great preachers like Barrow, the best contemporary writers like Mme. de Staël and Jane Austen, Wordsworth and Byron, Southey and Crabbe, are always cropping up in their letters. One wonders if the statesmen and great ladies of today spend their leisure hours in reading Virgil and Ariosto, and writing to each other about them. It is to be feared that while the English aristocracy of the eighteenth century created great libraries and read them, that of the nineteenth has only inherited them or sold them. Few things are more depressing than to stay in a country house which has a splendid library, full of intellectual delights and bibliographic glories, and find that none of its inhabitants ever reads anything but what comes from Smith or Mudie. But, perhaps, the new spirit, if, as we hope, it lasts after the war, will run through the whole country, and conquer even those splendid fortresses of the barbarians, the country houses. At any rate, here it is for the moment. What is it that soldiers and civilians are reading today? In the actual trenches, of course, it is mostly fiction. As Mr. Buchan says, "for a weary man and probably a wet man in a dirty dugout with a single candle" what is wanted is something absorbing; and Duma's "Monte Cristo," invariably asked for as "Monte Carlo," is Mr. Buchan's instance of the kind of thing that meets the demand. So far the report gives us only what we could have guessed. The unexpected comes in when we pass beyond fiction. The demand for the troops has been "surprisingly catholic" we are told. Among other books reported as asked for by soldiers were a Gothic grammar, an Anglo-Saxon dictionary, and an edition of Beowulf. It is difficult to separate the civilian from the military demand on the booksellers, but when we are

told that there has been a curious increase in the sale of books on astronomy one may naturally connect it with the airmen's new familiarity with the stars. French and Russian books have, of course, been in great request; but it will surprise those who regard the Greek and Latin classics as bugbears, or at best old fogies, to hear that they have been in very great demand, especially in the excellent Loeb edition, with both text and translation. But the most striking thing of all is the general increase in the demand for poetry, both for civilians and for troops, especially officers, whether in the field or in hospitals. The chief gainer, especially at first, was, naturally and rightly, Wordsworth. More lately there has been a great sale of Shelley, especially since the publication of the Poet Laureate's "Spirit of Man." Rupert Brooke's poems had, of course, an immense sale, and so have one or two other living poets. Mr. Wilson paid a very high tribute to the little volume "Poems of Today," lately issued by the English Association, which he declared, had had "a tremendous influence" in creating that "simply marvelous revival" of the interest in poetry on which he more than once laid stress.

One of the features of the present war is that it has been, more than any of its predecessors, a war of argument. It provides the most striking proof yet given of the power of public opinion in the modern world. Alas! also, no doubt of its impotence. For it is certain that the public opinion of every country except one was overwhelmingly pacific, and it is even possible that in that country, too, a free debate with all the facts disclosed would have gone equally decisively against the great crime of the war in which the German people have rather played the part of willing accomplices after the fact than that of the actual criminals,

who were a comparatively small group of men. But even Germany has shown a thoroughly modern eagerness to justify herself before the opinion of the world, and much time and ink have been wasted in that very unpromising task. Nobody can imagine Louis XIV taking much trouble to convince foreigners that he was only defending France when he devastated the Palatinate. But Germany has been pitiably anxious to prove the innocence of her Belgian atrocities. And in countries like France and England and the United States, where policy is now ultimately decided by the people, the war has inevitably produced an immense output of books dealing not only with its immediate causes, but with the history of Europe out of which it came. So it was not surprising to hear the speakers at this conference say that one of the features of the time was a greatly increased demand for books of history and of historical geography.

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On the whole, as has been said, the facts disclosed were most couraging, and the English Association deserves our gratitude for bringing them out at this moment, as well as for its other services to the cause of English literature, to which Mr. Mais paid a very enthusiastic tribute. But what is more interesting even than the facts is their meaning. What is it that the war has done for our minds, producing these results among others? Mr. de la Mare gave the meeting an admirable address, which, we understand, is to be reprinted for the members of the Association, on the influence the war has had on authors. But on the rest of us?

What conclusion can we draw from what we see around us and from what was said at this conference?

Perhaps, chiefly, that the life of the country is, on the whole, the healthier and he deeper for its great experience. Less interest is apparently felt in what Mr. Buchan called "torpid and aimless

narratives of unwholesome young men and trivial young women." There is also a smaller public for mere sentiment. Two of the novelists mentioned as having gone down in the world dealt largely in this commodity, while one who had gone up, Mr. Henry James, was certainly not at all a purveyor in ordinary to the pathetically disposed housemaid. A greater thing than sentiment has, to some extent, taken its place; a thing that needs poetry for its full expression: what we call emotion, the sorrowing, rejoicing, wrathful, loving spirit of man. Only the highest sort of human writing can satisfy that: the books that tell of man's greatest deeds in the past and of his hopes and fears and high resolves in the present; and therefore it has been a true instinct that has made people turn to history and poetry during the last year.

In vain do the professors of physical science tell us that the only way to win this or any future war is to give all our schooldays to chemistry or some other of the studies that deal with matter. We have no wish to neglect those studies. They have their place. But it is the second, not the first. It is not matter but spirit that is going to win this war. It is not matter but spirit that we are going to need to solve the problems that will come after the war. And it is literature, and literature alone, which can nourish that vital spirit. For literature, by its very nature, deals always with human life, while physical science, by its very nature, deals with matter which, if it has life at all, has at least no life which is human. The men of science have done great things for us in the last hundred years, but the greatest of all they cannot do. It is not in their province, but in that of the Bible and Homer and Shakespeare and Milton. We hope it will always be possible to pay a right attention, to pay perhaps more than we have paid, to the physical sciences without sac

rificing the claims of literature. But if we have to choose between them, our choice is instant and clear. We are not going to spend all the next generation in the making of explosives; and even if we were, it can only, at the very worst, be a small part of the people whose technical knowledge or ignorance will affect their making. But the whole of the people, each for his own sake and for the sake of all the rest too, will need a knowledge of human life; and that knowledge, so far as it is got from education at all, can only be got from literature. The wisest man of antiquity The Times.

turned away from the study of physical sciences and gave himself to that of the life of man. And why? Because,

as his great pupil declared, "an intelligent man will prize those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness, and wisdom, and will less value the others." And that is still as true today as when Plato first said it. It is for the English Association, the Classical Association, the Historical Association, and similar bodies, to see that it is not forgotten in the discussions about our educational system which will certainly arise after the war.

I.

Staff-Surgeon Michael O'Brien had a weakness for books with showy covers. In fact, he invariably judged a book by the cover. He was also inclined to impulsiveness. One morning he was making his rounds in the sick quarters of H.M.S. Alcibiades. He suddenly halted. A gurgling sound issued from his capacious throat. The sick-berth steward was alarmed. "Are you ill, sir?" he asked with some

concern.

No, the staff-surgeon was not ill. It was intended as a gurgle of delight. The dull-gray monotony of his daily existence had been transformed into something with color in it. His diagnostic eye had spotted a book on the table. Glaring red letters beckoned to him. They were written at a rakish angle. They trailed across a yellow background. They made up the words of the title J'accuse.

He pounced upon the volume. "In the king's name," he demanded, "whose book is this?"

"It's Wireless Operator Morgan's, sir," the sick-berth steward replied.

'Oh, you mean the bloke with belladonna in his eyes?"

"That's right, sir. He wants to go to hospital."

"Well, you can tell him ex cathedra -mind you don't say 'catheter'— that he isn't going. There's nothing wrong with his eyes. What's more to the point," the staff-surgeon continued, "he'll not be able to read for a week, so I'll borrow his book. You may also intimate to him that if he isn't careful I'll stop his rum."

"That ought to shake him up a bit, sir," the steward said with a grin.

II.

The staff-surgeon walked aft with his prize tucked under his arm. Carefully avoiding the snares of the wardroom, he made straight for his cabin. He was determined to commune at once with J'accuse.

Alas! man proposes, God disposes, especially in the navy.

The staff-surgeon was still gazing in rapture at the outrageous cover when the first lieutenant thrust his tousled ead into the former's cabin.