ply and directly by saying that as between Germany and Russia in the earlier years of the war, we were in favor of the defeat of Russia, and in so far proGerman. The reasons are implied in what has already been said. Austria gave such freedom to Polish Galicia that it was the headquarters of our revolutionary army; with Russian Poland free, the Austrian-Polish problem was comparatively simple. In 1913 a delegation of Poles from practically all party groups went to London to inform the British officials that if a European war broke out the Poles would be with Austria as against Russia. Austria was sufficiently dependent upon us so that we could use her pressure to wring concessions from Germany. The concessions came, partly because of Austria, and even more because Germany needed the help of Russian Poland against the unexpectedly strong military demonstration of Russia. Germany set up a National Council, which became the Regency of an independent Polish state. It did not meet our desires, as it included only Russian Poland. But that is much the most populous part of Poland. We took the half-loaf and bided our time. The recruiting of our army and the propaganda for liberation from Germany went on together. When the Russian revolution was effected, the Russian menace ceased and the army was ready to turn upon Germany. Its great leader, General Pilsudski, with other officers, is now in prison in Germany because the Polish army showed its hostility to Germany. But the fact that the Polish Regency was originally established by Germany is still used to discredit all Poles who adhere to the Regency as the only government which is on Polish soil and which is acknowledged by Poles in Poland as the nucleus of our new free, united and independent Poland.

Were I to deny that before the Russian Revolution the K. O. N. frequently criticized the Entente Allies, I could at once be confuted. But autocratic Russia was then one of the Allies; and the secret treaties have justified our earlier criticisms. They reveal that what we feared actually came to pass: France and Great Britain, doubtless against their own sentimental preferences, were forced to agree to allow Russia to "localize" the Polish question just as at the outbreak of the war Germany tried to persuade Europe to allow Germany to localize the Serbian question. The entrance of America into the war finished what the Russian revolution began. When President Wilson denounced the politics of the balance of power and insisted that hereafter no small nation should be a pawn or chattel in the bargainings of larger powers, it is impossible that he did not have Poland as well as Belgium in mind. In the sense in which his statements were anti-Entente, we were

anti-Entente. All we wish is that the centre of the Polish question, so far as it is not in Warsaw, Cracow and Posen, shall be in Washington, not in Paris or London. And for this we are made out to be of doubtful loyalty to the cause of the United States in the war!

As to our preference in encouraging recruiting for the American national army rather than for Paderewski's legions, the inconsistency is not ours. Every day we read the denunciations in the American press of hyphenism, and of the propagation of Germanism in this country. As Americans we do not wish to build an isolated Polishism in this country. We wish our sons to fight side by side with their fellow citizens. An active propaganda with the prestige of Paderewski behind it and an enormous fund (of which no accounting is rendered) has succeeded in recruiting fourteen thousand men. One hundred and eighty thousand of the Polish migration are in the American army. Where, O American reader, would you wish our pride and hope to be?

As Poles, we also want our men to be in the American army. What weight will Poland have in the Peace Councils because of an army, probably disbanded, of a few thousand men compared with the force exercized by President Wilson when the American army shall have brought victory over Germany? Are we traitors to America because we wish American policy to dominate the peace settlement? And we believe that so far as the policy of the Paris Committee of Poles is allowed to determine the decision regarding Poland, so far will the weight incline again in favor of the old politics of balance of power, imperialism and reactionism. Do not take our word or that of our enemies. Investigate for yourselves. But do not permit the matter to go by default.

In conclusion I add that it is one of the minor humors of the situation that the radical K. O. Ν. supports the present Regency of Poland, although its constitution is aristocratic. Unlike the Bolsheviki we prefer to postpone domestic politics to securing a free national life. When we find a conservative group, like that in Paris and their representatives in this country, opposing the authority of the only distinctively Polish government in spite of the conservatism of that government, is there not reason for thinking that personal rather than patriotic ambition is influencing them? Another peculiar fact is that though the Church in Poland is with the Regency-the Archbishop is to the fore in the triumvirate-Polish priests in this country are the chief collectors and propagandists for the ParisPaderewski faction. Again we ask for an explanation of motives.

JAN KOBIET.

J

VI

Joan Goes to Cambridge.

OAN followed a year after Peter in Cambridge. She entered Newnham at Newton Hall. Oswald pre

ferred Newnham to Girton because of the greater freedom of the former college. He was of opinion that if women were to be let out of purdah they might as well be let right out.

To Joan, coming from her high school at Highmorton to Newnham was like emerging from some narrow draughty passage in which one marches muddily with a whispering giggling hockey team all very much of a sort, into a busy and confused market-place, a rather squabbling and very exciting market-place, in which there is the greatest variety of sorts. And Joan's mind too was opening out in an even greater measure. A year or so ago she was a spirited, intelligent animal, a being of dreams and unaccountable impulses; in a year or so's time she was to become a shaped and ordered mind, making plans, controlling every urgency, holding herself in relation to a definite conception of herself and the world. We have still to gauge the almost immeasurable receptivity of those three or four crucial years. We have still to grasp what the due use of those years may mean for mankind.

Oswald had been at great pains to find out what was the best education the Empire provided for these two wards of his. But his researches had brought him to realize chiefly how poor and spiritless a thing was the very best formal education that the Empire could offer. It seemed to him, in the bitter urgency of his imperial passion, perhaps even poorer than it was. There was a smattering of Latin, a thinner smattering of Greek, a little patch of Mediterranean history and literature detached from past and future-all university history seemed to Oswald to be in disconnected fragments-but then he would have considered any history fragmentary that did not begin with the geological record and end with a clear tracing of every traceable consequence of the "period" in current affairs; there were mathematical specializations that did not so much broaden the mind as take it into a gully, modern and medieval language specializations, philosophical studies that were really not philosophical studies at all but partial examinations of remote and irrelevant systems, the study of a scrap of Plato or Aristotle here, or an excursion (by means of translations) into the Hegelian phraseology there. This sort of thing given out to a few thousand young men, for the most part greatly preoccupied with games, and to a few hundred young women, was all that Oswald could discover by way of mental binding for the entire empire. It seemed to him like innervating a body as big as the world with a brain as big as a pin's head.

As Joan and Peter grew out of school and went up to Cambridge they became more and more aware of a note of lamentation and woe in the voice of their guardian. He talked at them, over their heads at lunch and dinner, to this or that visitor. He also talked to them. But he had a great dread of preachments. They were aware of his general discontent with the education he was giving them, but as yet they had no standards by which to judge his charges. Over their heads his voice argued that the universities would give them no access worth considering

to the thoughts and facts of India, Russia, or China, that they were ignoring something stupendous called America, that their political and economic science still neglected the fact that every problem in politics, every problem in the organization of production and social cooperation is a psychological problem; and that all these interests were supremely urgent interests, and how the devil was one going to get these things in? But one thing Joan and Peter did grasp from these spluttering dissertations that flew round and about them. They had to find out all the most important things in life for themselves.

Perhaps the problem of making the teacher of youth an inspiring figure is an insoluble one. At any rate there was no great stir evoked in Joan and Peter by the personalities of any of their university tutors, lecturers, and professors. These seemed to be for the most part littlespirited, gossiping men. They had also an effect of being underpaid; they had been caught early by the machinery of prize and scholarship, bred, as they say at the Zoological gardens, "in the menagerie"; they were men who knew nothing of the world outside, nothing of effort and adventure, nothing of sin and repentance. Not that there were not whispers and scandals about, but such sins as the dons knew of were rather in the nature of scholarly affectations, got out of Petronius and Suetonius and practised with a tremendous sense of devilment behind locked doors, than those graver and larger sins that really distress and mar mankind. As Joan and Peter encountered these master minds, they appeared as gowned and capped individuals, hurrying to lecture rooms, delivering these lectures that were often hasty and indistinct, making obscure but caustic allusions to rival teachers, parrying the troublesome inquiring student with an accustomed and often quite pretty wit. With a lesser subtlety and a greater earnestness the women dons had fallen in with this tradition. There were occasional shy personal contacts. But at his tea or breakfast the don was usually too anxious to impress Peter with the idea that he himself was really only a sort of overgrown undergraduate to produce any other effect at all.

Into the Cambridge lecture rooms and laboratories went Joan and Peter, notebook in hand, and back to digestion in their studies, and presently they went into examination rooms, where they vindicated their claims to have attended to textbook and lecture. In addition Peter did some remarkably good sketches of tutors and professors and fellow students. This was their "grind," Joan and Peter considered, a drill they had to go through; it became them to pass these tests creditably if only to play the game towards old Nobby. Only with Peter's specialization in biology did he begin to find any actuality in these processes. He found a charm in phylogenetic speculations; and above the narrow canons of formal "research" there were fascinating uplands of wisdom. Upon those uplands there lay a light in which even political and moral riddles took on a less insoluble aspect. But going out upon those uplands was straying from the proper work. Joan got even less from her moral philosophy. Her principal teacher was a man shaped like a bubble, whose life and thought was all the blowing of a bubble. He claimed to have proved human immortality. It was, he said, a very long and severe logical process. About desire, about art, about social association, about love, about God-for he knew also that there was no God-it mattered not what deep question assailed him-this gifted being would dip into his Hegelian suds and blow without apparent effort, and there you were-as wise as when you started! And off the good man would float, infinitely self-satisfied and manifestly absurd.

But even Peter's biology was only incidentally helpful in answering the fierce questions that life was now thrusting upon him and Joan. Nor had this education linked them up to any great human solidarity. It was like being guided into a forest and lost there-by queer, absentminded men. They had no sense of others being there too upon a common adventure.

"And it is all that I can get for them!" said Oswald. "Bad as it is, it is the best thing there is."

He tried to find comfort in comparisons. "Has any country in the world got anything much better?"

One day Oswald found himself outside Cambridge on the Huntingdon road. It was when he had settled that Peter was to enter Trinity and while he was hesitating between Newnham and Girton as Joan's destiny. There was a little difficulty in discovering Girton. Unlike Newnham, which sits down brazenly in Cambridge, Girton is but half-heartedly at Cambridge, coyly a good mile from the fountains of knowledge, hiding its blushes between tall trees. He was reminded absurdly of a shy nice girl sitting afar off until father should come out of the public house.

He fell to thinking about the education of women in Great Britain.

At first he had been disposed to think chiefly of Peter's education and to treat Joan's as a secondary matter; but little by little, as he watched British affairs close at hand, he had come to measure the mischief feminine illiteracy can do in the world. In no country do the lunch and dinner-party, the country house and personal acquaintance, play so large a part in politics as they do in Great Britain. And the atmosphere of all that inner world of influence is a woman-made atmosphere, and an atmosphere made by women who are for the most part untrained and unread. Here at Girton and Newnham and at Oxford and Somerville he perceived there could not be room for a tithe of the girls of the influential and governing classes. Where were the rest? English womanhood was as yet only nibbling at university life. Where were the girls of the peerage, the county-family girls and the like? Their brothers came up, but they stayed at home and were still educated scarcely better than his Aunt Charlotte had been educated forty years ago-by a genteel person, by a sort of mental maid who did up their minds as their maids did up their hair for the dinner-table.

"No wonder," he said, "they poison politics and turn it all into personal intrigues. No wonder they want religion to be just a business of personal consolations. No wonder every sort of charlatan and spook dealer, fortuneteller and magic-healer, flourishes in London. Well, Joan anyhow shall have whatever they can give her here.

"It's better than nothing. And she'll talk and read.

.”

H. G. WELLS.

S

England and India-I

IR: The imperial policy of Great Britain is full of surprises. If it be true, as doubtless it is, that Americans have been perturbed by the course of affairs in Ireland and the further failure this summer of the War Cabinet to reach even a provisional settlement there, it is also true that they have been impressed by the announcement that the same government is entering upon a scheme of constitutional reconstruction in India. In the autumn of last year Mr. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, went out for the purpose of surveying the ground. The elaborate report lately presented by him to Parliament foreshadows what may not improbably prove to be the most momentous experiment in the history of imperial rule. Before considering what it involves, as the fruition of a century of development, it may be well to summarize the main influences lying behind it.

The Indian reform movement has passed through three stages. The first began in the eighties of last century, encouraged by the mild rule of Lord Ripon, an earnest Victorian liberal. Not alone on the political side, but ethically and socially also, it was European in idea and procedure. Its main organ of expression was the Indian National Congress, a gathering of rather loosely elected delegates from every province, meeting once a year in one or other of the large centres. The founders of the Congress belonged to the professional classes, and every one of them

was indebted to England for his political and economic theories and his methods of agitation. The dominant power, to be sure, had taken pains to provide abundant material. English history and political philosophy had been introduced into Indian colleges and universities. The young Indian, grounded in the faith of Milton and Burke, Маcaulay and Mill, passed on, naturally enough, to the imitation of Bright, Gladstone and Parnell. For his arguments and statistics he drew upon English critics of the Indian system. He developed a talent for journalism. The demands of the National Congress were amplified by able young publicists who carried on a continuous attack in hundreds of Indian-controlled newspapers, printed in English and the vernaculars. The chief result of this activity, at the end of twenty years, was the partial education in political controversy of a growing literate class and the building up of a large body of opinion aiming at a liberalized India, with representative councils, increasing control of the executive and taxation, and the opening of the public services to qualified Indians all the way up the scale, The seven years of Lord Curzon's viceroyalty covered the transition to the second period. Its governing principle was always candidly avowed. Lord Curzon believed with a whole heart in administrative efficiency, worked out and applied by the British corps d'élite. He held, that is, to a conception of England's place in India not essentially different from that which before the Mutiny of 1857 was accepted by men like Dalhousie and the Lawrences. Lord Curzon was unaware of the times in which he lived. Before he returned to England in 1905 the East was extraordinarily awake. No one could exaggerate the significance to Asia of the Japanese victories over Russia. Throughout the continent some of the oldest of peoples were acquiring the consciousness of nationality. In India a movement of remarkable complexity was gathering force. European reform influences were being crossed by forces of a far deeper and more subtle character. A half century of modern scholarship applied to the ancient texts, monuments and institutions had helped to produce an impassioned belief in the glory of the Indian past. The rise of reformed Hindu sects such as the Arya Samaj in Northern India and the personal force of teachers like Swami Vivekananda -whose dramatic appearance at the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893 started the popular study of Indian thought in the United States-combined to give a religious appeal to the newer Indian nationalism, which, in the opening years of the present century, was taking on characteristics very different from those belonging to the first generation of reformers. Its apostles preached the self-sufficiency of India. They were thinking, not of enlarged councils and posts in the public service, but of freedom. And at the moment of Lord Curzon's departure their programme was crystallized into the watchword Swadeshi, which is as close to Sinn Fein as any term could be. They brought into their newspapers and speeches a new note of conviction and defiance. The masters of language were with them, and on the higher levels of literary expression they had a powerful sympathizer in Rabindranath Tagore, who, however, could not at any stage be classed with the extremists.

It need hardly be said that this stage of the nationalist agitation, especially of course after bomb outrages became frequent, was disquieting to the authorities. Executive repression was applied with rigor. The freedom of press and platform was restricted. Many editors and agitators served various terms of imprisonment, some without the formality of trial. For about five years the control of Indian affairs in the Government was in the hands of John Morley, who, hating coercion with all his soul, gave the bureaucracy his support ort in the repressive policy while carrying through Parliament his great measure of constitutional reform, the Indian Councils Act of 1909. This measure and the visit of King George to India, two years later, an event bringing with it the reversal of the Curzon policy, closed the second period. It had produced a crop of varied Indian leadership, mostly of the demagogic order, many examples of devotion to an idea, and one statesman of noble character and achievement-G. K. Gokhale, who died at the summit of his usefulness in the first year of the war. There are many who regard his death and the absence of a successor as the tragedy of the present hour.

The outbreak of war made an end of the past no less decisively in India than in the west. There was of course never a moment's doubt as to the unity of the British commonwealth in the face of the great menace. But India was not in the commonwealth: what would she do? The answer came in a general and very remarkable outburst of loyalty. The princes came forward with unlimited offers of money and service. The landowners, mer

chants, and professional men, the educated classes generally, were no less prompt and generous. The whole of articulate India was, apparently, eager to render service to the empire. It is not easy to meet the criticism that what was wrong was the attitude and behavior of the officials. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy is deeply suspicious. Its habit and tradition do not tend to a policy of trust. The Indian public complained that its offers were rejected and its enthusiasm chilled. However it came about, we must admit that a few months after the appearance of the Indian Expeditionary Force on the western front, the picture presented by India was not encouraging. Disturbances of various kinds were reported, there was an ominous revival of gang robbery (dacoity), hundreds of suspects, including many intellectuals, were interned, and a severe censorship was established.

It was in such circumstances as these that the political situation came to be dominated by the Home Rule for India League, while the personality of Mrs. Besant assumed a fresh and startling importance. The third stage of the Indian political movement is identified with the character and activities of this remarkable Irish woman.

Annie Besant went to live in India something more than a quarter of a century ago. No living woman has had a more singular career. After separating from her husband, an English Episcopal clergyman, she was for years the associate of Charles Bradlaugh, the British Ingersoll, in a campaign of radical atheism, the pair of them making the most formidable platform combination in the country. A little later she placed her wonderful eloquence and vitality at the service of the infant Fabian Society, and finally passed under the dominion of H. P. Blavatsky and the esoteric doctrine of theosophy. Her day in England was over. She had exchanged the arid secularist negation for a mystic faith which promised fulfilment and spiritual peace, and India, of which she then knew nothing, seemed to offer an unbounded field for her energies. Those who fol

lowed her career in the east were led to think that her ambition would have been satisfied if she could have achieved two things: the unchallenged leadership of the International Theosophical Society and the expansion of the Central Hindu College, which she had founded at Benares, into a Hindu university. For this institution Mrs. Besant sought a charter from the government of India, her aim being to make it, in distinction from the secularist government colleges, a centre of specific Hindu culture, colored by the occult doctrines which, hidden in a cloud of Sanskrit terms, have an attraction for restless inquirers in the west while provoking the orthodox Orientalist to blaspheme.

Mrs. Besant did not attain either ambition. Sectional rebellion has accompanied her direction of the Theosophical Society. She has made excursions into stranger regions even than those commonly explored by occultists, and in particular she risked the unity of her followers by starting a queer messianic cult, the oddities of which have been lost sight of during the war. Consequent upon this hapless adventure Mrs. Besant had to abandon the Benares College, into which she had put twenty years of arduous work, while a series of sensational suits in the law courts of Madras overthrew her authority in the theosophical movement. A position of unquestioned leadership is for Mrs. Besant an essential. Realizing that her place in the theosophical field was imperiled, she turned once more to politics, with her old power as an agitator almost undiminished. She founded the Home Rule League, acquired control of two newspapers, and was rapidly able to show the nationalists of India that there were many things in the way of political propaganda which they might learn from an elderly European woman. So long as Lord Hardinge was Viceroy Mrs. Besant was not interfered with, but soon after the present Governor-General, Lord Chelmsford, took over charge, the government came down upon her, thereby making certain her election to the chair of the National Congress. Mrs. Besant was interned in a Madras hill-station for several months. She was released a year ago, on the eve of Mr. Montagu's departure for India to inaugurate the new policy which must form the theme of a second letter.

S

MRS. JOHN L. WILLIAMS.

A Reply to "Enemy" Citizens

IR: Your correspondent, Mr. H. L. Klein, falls into error when he says that he and others in a similar situation are not given equal treatment with other citizens in the military or naval service.

Perhaps the following facts will enlighten him, and possibly be instrumental in securing for him the position he so much desires in the United States Army:

The War Department promulgated a ruling immediately after the outbreak of hostilities which excluded persons born in the Central Empire, and countries connected therewith, but who were citizens of the United States, from being commissioned officers in the Army. That ruling was peculiarly appropriate at the time, in view of the large spy system carried on in the United States prior to the beginning of the war, and even immediately afterwards. Mr. Klein should not feel it necessary that he take upon himself the task of laying down rules by which the War Department shall be governed. Every person of intelligence will trust the officials of the War Department

whose duties are to formulate plans and means to carry on this gigantic war.

Under the high guidance of our Secretary of War, the original ruling relating to the status of the citizen of this country who was born in an enemy country was subsequently slightly modified to permit such person to be commissioned in the Army, provided he came to this country before he was five years of age, and provided also he was qualified in other respects.

I know of cases where persons in the same "unfortunate" position of Mr. Klein have been commissioned in the Army. It may be stated that the Army has already sufficient commissioned men, so that persons who are on the list waiting to be commissioned may not think they are discriminated against because they are not appointed in quick order. Such is not the case, for the War Department is really appointing men to commissionships, regardless of their place of birth, provided they emigrated to this country before the age of five, and provided, further, they are qualified in other respects to hold commissions.

Washington, D. C.

SAMUEL RAPPAPORT.

The Y. M. C. A.'s Religious Tests

SIR:

IR: A man I know was kicking recently about the Y. M. C. A.'s religious tests. Said he wanted to serve in France, but wasn't religious, so they wouldn't take him.

I said: "You might have told them that you were religious, just as boys under age tell the recruiting sergeant they are 21. Be patriotic and say you're a Unitarianwhat do you care?"

He said: "A lot you know. I don't think they take Unitarians."

"Well," I said, "Good Lord, say you're a Methodist then."

as one

He replied that it wasn't as simple as I seemed to think. " I suppose I could talk my way past the desk by the hall door," he said. "But that isn't enough. I've got to have references, and they'd have to back me up pretty hard. When I first applied, I named Johnnie R of my references, and Johnnie says the Y. M. C. A. wrote and asked him three questions: First, Had he ever seen me at prayer? Second, Did he know if I read the Bible daily? Third, How many souls had I brought to Jesus?"

That is all the conversation I had with my friend on this subject, but he said as he left me he considered this a pretty stiff test. So do I-if it's true. But I doubt it.

I know there is an impression that the Y. M. C. A. is strict about this, and will not let patriotic men help in their service abroad if they are agnostics or Catholics or Jews or Unitarians (though President Taft is a Unitarian). But the fact is, I believe, they take any one of a good Christian "character," and have accepted Jews on this basis, as well as agnostics. My friend was either rejected under some old régime, now superseded, or else was unsatisfactory as a person which might easily happen.

The Y. M. C. A. enrolled another friend of mine this year as a member as soon as he paid them a fee for taking automobile lessons, though he told them he wasn't a believer and would much rather not. If they were so liberal in this case, is it likely they are so strict in these

others?

New York City.

CLARENCE DAY, JR.