logue. Paintings, etchings, sculpture, and pottery are among the objects reproduced in the pictures, and in one is displayed a Greek gold earring to which a modern jeweller may find it refreshing to refer when accused of showing superlatively bad taste in suiting ornaments to the position which they are meant to occupy, although its beauty may arouse his envy. The volume is bound in gift book fashion, uniform with Mr. David C. Preyer's "The Art of the Metropolitan Museum of New York." No good Bostonian or loyal New Yorker will have any doubt as to which is the more valuable. L. C. Page & Co.

The Pole, like the Irishman, refuses to accept any criticism, favorable or unfavorable, of his country or of his countrymen, on the ground that just criticism of Poland is impossible to any persons not of his own blood, and it is highly improbable that one Pole in ten thousand annually reads ten pages of all written about Poland in foreign magazines and newspapers. For this reason, Mr. Henryk Sienkiewicz's "Whirlpools" has no slight political importance, for, foreign distraction being a negative quantity, the attention of the Pole is the more strongly drawn towards utterances of native authors. No one has more effectively reminded the Europe of to-day that Sarmatia was once her bulwark

against the savage and the infidel, and that if, in a later day, she yielded to European powers it was because her strength had for centuries been spent in the service of the continent. Therefore when Mr. Sienkiewicz writes almost despairingly of present conditions and future prospects, it must be a most unreasonable compatriot who refuses to believe him honest. As for the validity of the prophecy, which he puts into the mouth of one of the cleverest

men in the story, it is to be remembered: it runs, "Let things continue to proceed thus [with murders by the rabble] and who knows whether, after ten or twenty years, we will not bury art, learning, culture, bah! even the entire civilization! There will be an endless series of such events." In the story, it is this popular disorder which, working below the surface of things, secretly causes the great misfortunes of the personages at the same moment that it disturbs their superficial peace and happiness, and it is impossible to say too much of the ingenuity with which a series of incidents in no wise extraordinary and a group of personages not far removed from the commonplace are used to exhibit the actual state of the country and the nation. Taken simply as a story, the book presents an uncommon but not unprecedented situation as its main interest and a family group with a few of its friends as its personages. The hero is a youth perfectly contented to have no particular morals, but with some personal charm, and an air of latent ability; a young musician of extraordinary purity of soul; a peasant girl whose history is so moulded by exterior circumstances that her personal character counts for little, although she holds the chief position of interest, and these with a vain, shallow, violent peasant girl, who naturally gravitates towards the nationalists although too ignorant to understand even the meaning of the word designating their party, are the principal personages. The remaining characters, the chorus to the drama, are as carefully finished and as vivid as the chief personages. Although it may not be as widely read as "Quo Vadis," with its peculiar attractions, the story is the best and the book the most valuable yet produced by its author. Little, Brown & Co.

No

It is no exaggeration to state that within the next few months the whole fiscal, and simultaneously the whole political and social, future of the Empire may be decided. And that decision will be made at Washington. less a significance can be attached to the forthcoming negotiations for a Reciprocity Treaty between Canada and the United States. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance that all who have at heart the Imperial ideal should strain every nerve to prevent so fatal an event. That this disaster will be averted for the reasons adduced below is the confident hope of the present writer; but the magnitude of the interests involved is, nevertheless, a sufficient justification for treating the situation with all seriousness. As Octavio is made to say in Schiller's Death of Wallenstein, "Too much foresight is better than too little."

. No better method, perhaps, of realizing the present position can be adopted than to consider the circumstances which led up to the conclusion and abrogation of the Elgin-Marcy Treaty of Reciprocity which was in force between Canada and the U.S.A. from 1854 to 1866. By so doing we shall see what special influences were then at work, and also what circumstances that had weight then are to be found again in the present juncture. Now the Elgin-Marcy Treaty was pre-eminently the result of peculiar circumstances. Prior to 1846 a certain form of Zollverein was in existence in the British Empire, though it was of quite a different type from that which modern Imperialists seek to establish. In that year, however, Free Trade was adopted in Great Britain by the Peel Administration, and, despite numerous protests from the British North American Provinces, their grain and flour, which

had enjoyed a preference in the British market since 1828, were left to the untempered rivalry of American products. Two other circumstances served. to make the year 1846 memorable. In the first place the Legislatures of British North America were granted their fiscal freedom by the Imperial Parliament, and in the second place, the duties under the U.S.A. tariff on farm produce such as the Canadian farmers exported were raised to a most formidable height. In addition to these three important events we must bear in mind that there was much unwillingness on the part of Canada (if we may, for convenience' sake, use the term in a sense which it did not, strictly, acquire till Federation was accomplished) to let go the old commercial tie with the United Kingdom, and that the British Government were frequently blamed for not having in 1846 obtained for Canadian shipping any advantage in the carrying trade and for not having wrung from the U.S.A. the free admission into that country of Canadian products.

It is not difficult, therefore, to understand that Canadians should have been impelled to turn away from a Mother Country which had apparently so little regard for the interests of her colonies, and in which the famous dictum of Turgot was universally accepted, and to look towards their immediate neighbor. It was argued by many that it was to the interest of Canada to be annexed to the United States, and Lord Elgin, writing in 1849 to Lord Grey, then Colonial Secretary, declared that:

There has been a vast deal of talk about annexation, as is unfortunately always the case when there is anything to agitate the public mind. A great deal of this talk is, however, bravado, and a great deal the mere product of thoughtlessness. Undoubtedly it is in

some quarters the utterance of very serious conviction; and if England will not make the sacrifices which are absolutely necessary to put the colonists here in as good a position commercially as the citizens of the States-in order to which free navigation and reciprocal trade with the States are indispensable; if not only the organs of the League,' but those of the Government and of the Peel Party are always writing as if it were an admitted fact that Colonies, and more especially Canada, are a burden to be endured only because they cannot be got rid of, the end may be nearer than we wot of.

Now, we must remember that Reciprocity, as understood by Canada, did not embrace the free exchange of manufactures. Canada at that date had practically no manufactures for export. To have established free exchange in manufactures would, therefore, have opened no market to Canadian manufacturers in the United States, while the free importation of American goods would not only have curtailed the revenues of the various provinces more than they could bear but would also have involved discrimination against the United Kingdom. A Reciprocity Treaty confined to natural products, it may easily be understood, aroused but tepid enthusiasm in the United States which saw that under it a country containing barely three million people, mainly occupied in agriculture, lumbering, fishing and mining, was to be admitted to a free market in a country with more than ten times the population, of which a large number were engaged in trade and of which the purchasing power was much greater. Fortunately, however, for Canada, there were other considerations which eventually turned the scales. There is no need to go into these at length. They are concisely stated by Mr. Porritt in his most useful book. Sixty Years of Protection in Canada, 1846-1907, where he says:

i... the Corn Law League.

Among the influences which led to its adoption was the desire to avoid trouble over the fisheries; the advantages offered to the New England States in which there were manufacturing industries; to the State of New York, with its interest in lake and St. Lawrence navigation; and to the graingrowing States of the middle West. Southern Senators who, in 1853, constituted the pivotal section of the Democratic Party which was then dominant at Washington, were by this time in favor of reciprocity, because they feared that unless trade conditions were improved in Canada the annexation movement of 1849 might become serious. If the British North American Provinces should come into the Union they feared that the balance of power at Washington between the Slave States and the Free States would be jeopardized.

The United States did not take long to find out that they were, on the whole, getting distinctly the worst of the bargain. In the report on the history and statistics of the trade relations between the two countries, which he was appointed by the United States Government to write, Mr. Larned declared that "it was simply impossible that an arrangement of incomplete free trade, so non-reciprocal, so one-sided in its operation, and so provokingly the result, as was the treaty of 1854, of a sharply forced bargain on the fisheries question, could be allowed to continue beyond the term for which it was contracted." But, as several influences had gone to secure the adoption of the treaty, so various causes, other than its purely commercial result, procured its termination. One of the direct results of the events of 1846 had been the beginning of the movement in Canada towards what was subsequently known as the National Policy. By the year 1858 the Association for the Promotion of Canadian Industry was already manifesting its power. In the following year Galt still further raised the duties on many articles in his Province, while