Every country, it is said, has the government it deserves. It is indeed a subject for searching speculation whether this vast American world of the future, speaking the English tongue from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, will deserve the government which is the right of just men. The fight for cleanness of government is, as the age of nations is reckoned, only beginning. Mr. Roosevelt has blown his bugle for the assault on the corrupt walls of party organization, and superficially, at all events, his own party has suffered in the exchange of blows. We say "superficially" because the principle for which Mr. Roosevelt stands has of course received no set-back whatever. He has shown, on the contrary, that there are enough people interested in clean administration, and in the preference of individual interests to those of rich and powerful corporations, to cripple any party which clings to its old allegiance to the "bosses." Mr. Taft in his railway legislation has done one definite good thing, but he has not yet done enough to satisfy the Insurgents. The present Session is the last under the Republican majority. In the next Session we shall see whether the Democratic majority has the will and power to enforce independent legislation. We do not suppose for a moment that the Democrats will attempt to introduce Free-trade, for Free-trade has not been adopted even by them as a practical policy; but there is no doubt that the tariff is widely unpopular, and the high cost of living in the towns may well make it increasingly so. Mr. Taft calls this Payne-Aldrich Tariff the best revenue-producer ever framed in the United States. For the present, as his recent Message to Congress announced, he proposes no changes in the tariff. In another Session it will no doubt be tinkered, but, we suspect, with much the same results as before;

every remedy of a grievance in a tariff produces a new grievance. One thing in Mr. Taft's otherwise unexciting Message is indeed astonishing. He says that reform in the working of the administrative Departments has caused a saving of £13,000,000, and the Estimates are reduced by that amount. It is most creditable to have effected that retrenchment. But what are we to say of the previous laxity which had consented to an unnecessary expenditure of £13,000,000 annually? What is saved with one hand, however, is to some extent given away (quite rightly and inevitably, we admit) with the other. The Panama Canal, which will almost certainly be finished in 1915, is to be fortified at a cost of nearly £5,000,000. This is in addition, of course, to the cost of construction, which will be £75,000,000.

With a fortified Panama Canal before their eyes as a permanent reminder of their undertaking to do the work and accept the responsibilities of a great military Power, the American people of the future will turn their attention more seriously to the development of their Army and Navy. That appears to us inevitable. In his remarkable book, "The Valor of Ignorance," General Homer Lea expressed his belief that the population of the United States is so hopelessly heterogeneous that there is no common ideal, and nothing like a general aspiration towards good citizenship. He believes that Americans are more criminal than any civilized nation, and that there is in the mind of the mass a distinct tinge of "feminism," by which he seems to mean irrationality. He thinks that if these things were not so the nation would long ago have recognized how feebly its armed power meets the obligations laid on it by such a contentious political principle as the Monroe doctrine and by the provocations given to Japan. In a strategical sense the

Alaska are all sources of weakness. Seizing these places as bases, Japan might conduct a campaign on the Pacific slope with ridiculous ease. General Lea is haunted by this fear. Well, he is a prophet, and the visions of prophets are vivid. For ourselves, we do not by any means deny the dangers. But we do not take it to be proved that The Spectator.

States for turning good Americans out of any material shows any signs of failing. And if the solidarity of the nation holds good we should be surprised, after all, if the performance of the North in the Civil War in welding a formidable army under stress could not be repeated.

In her "Stories from the Chronicle of the Cid," Miss Mary W. Plummer has collected and re-told for young readers some of the most striking adventures of the Spanish hero, Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, otherwise El Seid or Cid. She has drawn her material in part from Southey's "Chronicle" and in part from Lockhart's Spanish Ballads, and has given to her version a directness and simplicity which are quite her own. Ten or twelve full-page illustrations hance the attractiveness of the book. Henry Holt & Co.

en

Lovers of Irish verse are in the habit of turning to Denis A. McCarthy's poems with an assurance that they will find in them the true thing,-natural and spontaneous, genuine in sentiment and full of melody. They will welcome the new edition of his "Voices from Erin, and Other Poems," which Little, Brown & Co. publish. There are sixty or seventy bits of verse in the collection, some of them devout, some patriotic, some reminiscent, and some light and care-free as the song of a bird in the spring. One of the most

characteristic is "A Bit o' the Brogue" with which the book closes, which opens thus:

"Sure, the very best thing in the world, I should say,

To help a man conquer his cares day by day,

And baffle the buffets of Fate,-the ould rogue!

Is a bit o' the brogue. Yes, a bit o' the brogue is a wondherful thing;

It heartens a man at his labor to sing; It gives a man courage, it gives a man stringth,

And it makes a man masther his troubles at lingth. For along with a bit o' the brogue goes the blood

Of a race that can thrace thimselves back to the Flood.

A race that refused Noah's offer of shelther

Whin the bastes all flocked into the ark helther-skelther.

So afraid that their national prestige 'twould dim,

Faith, they wouldn't accept any favors from him."

Dr. James A. Honey is at pains to explain that his little collection of "South African Folk-Tales," which the Baker & Taylor Company publishes, is not in any sense original; and it may be that most of them may be found in various repositories of South African literature, exploration and travel. But as a collection they are new, and separately they will be new to most readers who find them in this little volume. They are all animal stories, translated from the native tongues, mostly from

the versions of the Bushmen. They are unique in their simplicity, and they give interesting glimpses of ways of life and thought which are fast passing before advancing civilization.

Some one has said that what calls itself "New Thought" now-a-days is onethird old truth warmed over, one-third flub, and one-third error. This, obviously, is an exterior and unsympathetic definition; but whoever wishes cheerful and authoritative exposition of "New Thought" by one of the leading authorities of the school, will find it in Dr. Orison Swett Marden's "The Miracle of Right Thought" (Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.). Dr. Marden's earlier volume "Peace, Power and Plenty" has enjoyed a wide circulation and readers who feel that they have been helped by it to saner and more cheerful living will turn with eagerness to this new treatise on the old lines.

It

In a compact and clearly arranged volume which he entitles "The Old Testament Narrative" Mr. Alfred Dwight Sheffield presents the narratives of the Old Testament as a connected whole, following as a rule the King James version, but making some changes suggested by later scholarship or essential to clearness. The value of such a rearrangement of the narratives to a clearer understanding of Hebrew history can hardly be over-estimated. avoids duplications, pays regard to historic sequence, and sets in their proper places in one continuous history the narratives contained in separate books. The sources are in all cases clearly shown; there are explanatory notes and pictures; and the chapter divisions and sub-heads enhance the impression of a consistent and coherent narrative. In an Introduction, Mr. Sheffield presents a succinct summary of the Old Testament history and narrative, which supplies a useful key to the text. Alto

gether, the book is well adapted to the use of the general reader and of the student; and its introduction as a textbook in schools and colleges might do much to dissipate the woeful ignorance of Biblical history and references which prevails among the present generation of students. Houghton Mifflin Company.

With "A History of Education in the United States since the Civil War" (Houghton Mifflin Company) President Charles F. Thwing of Western Reserve University completes a round dozen of volumes written at various times during the last score of years upon educational subjects. The present volume is the most comprehensive of all his studies in this field; for it has to do not only with the college, the university and the professional schools but with the public schools, the summer schools and every form of educational interest and endeavor. Of moderate size and of cheerful yet judicial temper, President Thwing's review of tendencies and results in all these fields of educational activity during the last four and a half decades is illuminating and instructive. Dr. Thwing does not write as one who has a theory to establish, and whose chief concern with facts and statistics is to make them strengthen his theory. He is as candid in his use of his material as he is painstaking in the collection of it; and, if his conclusions are not altogether roseate, it is because the conditions are not. But, while he sees and acknowledges existing defects, he does not question nor minimize the general progress which has been witnessed during the period of which he writes. He finds that during that period "a distinct lifting of the community has taken place"; and that, though the single mountain peaks or ranges may be no higher "the plateau has been raised."

SIR PEDIVERE.

["Sir Pedivere, having slain his Lady in a fit of jealous rage, was bidden by Launcelot to carry her to Winchester there to abide the judgment of Queen Guenever."-"The Noble History of King Arthur."]

The Queen had said to him: "Go thou to Rome,

And bear her with thee, since she was thy wife,

And lay her at the Holy Father's feet. And if, he, seeing her as she is now, All pale and bloodied who was once so fair,

Can help to cleanse thee from thy grievous sin,

Why, thou shalt be forgiven, Pedivere."

So they put harness on the strong white horse

He rode in tourneys, and he went at dawn

Through leafless woods, and in the falling rain,

And knew that in the brake at either side

Were greedy eyes that watched him going by,

And saw the chain of gold about his neck.

Yet he would wear it since it was her gift.

He had no lance, no sword, he was unarmied.

The wrought steel of his gorget and his mail

Might bruise her tender flesh. He thought of that,

He, who had killed her; so he was unarmed;

And yet none stayed him, as he rode with Death.

He wrapped her body in a cloak of furs, Since though he held her close she

seemed so cold;

Though often, as he rode, he bent his head

To kiss her lips or whisper in her ear. Then, as night fell, he fancied that she moved,

And he was glad, and called her by her

name.

The horse could go no farther, so he stayed,

And laid his burden down beneath a tree,

Close by the river's edge, and watched it there.