liberal sentiment or which may come into the ascendant and lead on to the domination-presumably temporary-of a crude materialistic nationalism.

The Destinies of the Stars, by Svante Arrhenius; translated by J. E. Fries. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.50.

TRANSLATION of these admirable lectures by one of the foremost physicists of the world, president of the Nobel Institute, and recipient in 1903 of the Nobel prize in chemistry, will be very welcome to all interested in popular dissemination of science. Arrhenius showed his special competence for this broad subject in his earlier volumes, World in the Making, and Life of the Universe. The present collection of articles and lectures on kindred subjects is the best popular presentation of it in brief compass. Its translation was highly desirable, and seems correctly to convey the sense in reasonably good and intelligible English. It is regrettable that some reviser of the proof more familiar than Mr. Fries with the English forms of classical proper names did not see that Heriod (p. 12), Currelian (p. 26) and some other worthies received their accustomed names.

The Prince of Parthia, by Thomas Godfrey. Edited by Archibald Henderson. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $1.50.

THERE is a sort of fellow in the world of orders and

brotherhoods that sets up something with himself at the head and works and lifts, the higher the order the higher its mogul. In the world of scholarship this sort of manthey are not uncommon-would take a subject for his own and try to force it on men as an important something long neglected, with himself the expert in the field.

Professor Henderson in his edition of The Prince of Parthia avoids this kind of academic swindle entirely. In a lengthy but discreet introduction he gives us a piece of definite research in this modest region and places Thomas Godfrey where he belongs: as the author of the first American tragedy; a provincial poet of fair culture and promise, but dying young, and a member of a notable circle in Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia.

The play itself takes Racine and Shakespeare for its schools, is no worse than they are at their worst, and though uncertain in suspense and generally uneven, might be, if acted in the conservatory style of its period, not without dignity and occasional effect.

The publishers of the book, the first printing since the original a century and a half ago, deserve the gratitude of the students of American drama for such a thankless venture commercially and for the style of the volume itself.

Contributors

to this Issue

WILLIAM HARD-A writer on public affairs, now investigating problems of organization for the New Republic in Washington.

RUSSELL J. WILBUR-A Roman Catholic clergyman.

JAN KOBIET-Is a pseudonym.

H. G. WELLS.

S. K. RATCLIFFE-A well known London journalist and lecturer, now in this country. The English representative of the New Republic. Formerly editor of the Statesman, Calcutta.

THE THREE BLACK PENNYS

A Novel by JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER. ($1.60) GOLD AND IRON

Three Tales by JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER. ($1.50)

WHERE BONDS ARE LOOSED

A tale of the Tropics by E. L. GRANT WATSON. ($1.60)

THE MAINLAND

By E. L. GRANT WATSON. A sequel to WHERE
BONDS ARE LOOSED. ($1.60)

ZELLA SEES HERSELF

A novel by E. M. DELAFIELD. ($1.50) THE THREE-CORNERED HAT

By PEDRO A. DE ALARCON; translated by JACOB S. FASSETT, JR. A gay and mischievous Spanish classic. ($1.25)

These are not ordinary books of fiction. They are literature that I am proud to have published. Sooner or later intelligent people will have to read them. I suggest you ask your bookseller to show them to you to-day.

BABSON'S SERVICE FOR MANUFACTURERS Babson Reports accurately forecast the course of commodity quotations. Particulars sent free. Write to Dept. N-29 of Babson's Statistical Organization Wellesley Hills, Mass. Compiling Building

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VOLUME XVI

N°

.H. J. L. 80

.F. H. 81 .H. J. L. 82 .L. U. 83 .R. E. R. 84

OT the least gratifying fact about the recent Allied counter-offensive was that its initial and greatest triumph was won by British troops. Their success in the attack gives evidence of a complete recovery by the British army from its defeat of last March. As a result of prodigious exertions and great sacrifices the British government has replaced the decimated divisions and restored the captured and destroyed material. It was a magnificent achievement of which every British citizen has a right to feel proud, and whose effects in the near future are likely to be even more important than they have already been. For the striking power of General Haig's army is manifestly far from being exhausted by the last battle of the Somme. In all probability it will soon strike again and it will strike hard. The more power to its elbow. May it yet prove to be the instrument of Allied victory as effective and as successful as it was originally intended to be!

TH

Number 198

HE varying fortunes of the British military operations during the war will be an interesting matter for future military historians to study. On the whole, the British have fought more successfully on the defensive than on the offensive. The original British army showed wonderful moral tenacity in the retreat after Mons and really heroic powers of resistance in the first battle of Ypres. But when its turn came to attack it was less successful. Neuve Chapelle and Loos were costly failures in which the staff work broke down and in which the ground gained was not worth the lives of the brave men which were sacrificed to pay for it. The first battle of the Somme and the Flanders offensive exhibited the new army as a powerful, dogged, but somewhat clumsy instrument, which could take and give terrible punishment but whose leadership lacked the flexibility and the inventiveness indispensable to great military success. The first battle of Cambrai afforded the first indication of a tactical originality, but it was rendered abortive by over-confidence, inferior staff work and lack of cooperation with the French. Then came the crushing defeat of the Fifth Army in March, which must be in part charged to the same causes which accounted for the reverse at Cambrai. In the subsequent fighting in Flanders the British army once more had its back to the wall and it showed all its old grit and endurance. It was forced to yield ground but it inflicted losses on the Germans which weakened enormously their subsequent offensive power. Thereafter they let the British alone and this respite, whatever its cause, has had disastrous consequences for them. The British army is as powerful as it ever was and if the Germans are not strong enough to attack it they must themselves prepare for a succession of attacks.

initiative to the limit. If the French and the English succeed in winning a considerable military victory this fall, without any more assistance than they are now deriving from the American army, the political benefits of a victory won in this way will be enormous. The German Staff started the campaign of 1918 with the intention of reaching a military decision favorable to themselves before the

promising. If it is not avoided it would do well to withdraw the original statement and admit what we are doing. It would be embarrassing for the State Department to be obliged continually to dodge the conundrum, "When is military intervention not military intervention?"

IT

to obtain a decision, and will probably have to adopt hereafter a defensive strategy, in spite of the fact that the American army is only partly ready. The Germans are, consequently, extremely depressed, but their depression will become much greater in case an Allied counter-offensive conducted chiefly by the French and British armies can actually throw them back and confront them with the possibility of an invasion next summer. They would be rendered morally less certain of themselves by a defeat inflicted during 1918 by their European neighbors than by a defeat inflicted during 1919 chiefly by the American army. For in 1919 the odds will be overwhelmingly against them and they might yield to superior numbers without being sufficiently chastened by defeat. But if the French and British armies, aided only by a distinctly auxiliary American force, can compel them to retire towards the frontier, they will be the more likely to accept the verdict as politically decisive and abandon the idea of dominating Europe. The French and British governments have every inducement to borrow from their enemy the original purpose of his campaign and, if possible, use the next three months to force a decision.

THE

HE evidence of divided counsels and of uncertainty of aim, which was so clearly betrayed in the statement issued by the American government about Russian intervention, has accumulated during the past ten days. The American and Japanese troops, according to the original statement, could not be needed in large quantities because they were to defend the rear of the CzechoSlovaks, but the Czecho-Slovaks are themselves claiming the necessity of much larger bodies of troops to make their position perfectly secure. In putting in this demand they are perfectly logical. Once a government proposes to use military measures in order to solve a political problem, it usually becomes the victim of its own instrument. There is no limit to the number of troops which may eventually be shipped to Siberia in order to assist the Czecho-Slovaks in their present enterprise, and those troops will have to be Japanese. It remains to be seen what the American government will do either to avoid or to accept this result. If it is avoided, well and good; but the prospects are not

Reform Act in England had finally settled the problem of woman suffrage. But it is the traditional habit of the British people to admit a principle and then to embark upon an embittered fight over its detached application. The British Labor party has recently selected several women to contest seats at the coming general election; and a few weeks ago nomination papers were refused to Miss Nina Boyle upon a technicality only. This seems to have stirred the legal advisers of the Crown to action, and, in their wisdom, they have decided that women under the terms of the new franchise are not eligible to Parliament. It is, to say the least, a decision as extraordinary as it is unexpected. The idea that the right to the franchise is divorced from the right to a seat in a legislative assembly is not, of course, new; but it has hitherto been characteristic rather of veiled autocracies such as the France of Louis Philippe than of states claiming to be democratic. Nor must the character of this legal opinion be mistaken. Virtually speaking, it legislates. It is bound to influence the decision of the courts; and it will probably need an Act of Parliament to overcome it. The contrast between this attitude and the obvious way in which Miss Rankin's membership of Congress was taken for granted is curious indeed. There have been few instances of so legalistic an attack upon public sentiment as this reactionary opinion. It suggests that the law department of the English government is totally out of accord with the spirit of the time.

B

ETWEEN the Russian people and the people of the Allied nations there is no conflict of interest that would justify an appeal to war. Therefore we ought not to take too seriously acts that in other circumstances might be considered casus belli. The arrest and temporary detention of British consular officers in Russia, Lord Robert Cecil announces, will not be made to serve as a cause of war, because Russia has no recognized government. Neither will America interpret too narrowly the apparent Bolshevik interference with Ambassador Francis's dispatches. On their side the Russians have something to overlook. The uninvited presence of Allied forces on Russian soil in the Far East and on the North would mean war, if Russia were looking for war. The continued recognition by the United States of a Russian repre

sentative who has openly repudiated the only government that has existed in Russia for the better part of a year is an irregularity that might be set off against the Bolshevik treatment of Ambassador Francis, if Russia really wanted to be embroiled with America. On both sides, fortunately, common sense appears to retain precedence over diplomatic punctilio, and so long as this condition obtains, there is hope that no serious disaster to the cause of democracy will result from well meaning but mistaken acts on the part of either Russia or the Allies.

We shall need more light before we decide whether we shall enlarge the scope of our enterprise.

THE

HE National Association for Universal Military Training is urging the calling up of all boys of eighteen for training in military camps, but with the proviso that they shall not be sent overseas before they have attained the age of nineteen. Thus, the association suggests, much of the popular anxiety about the drafting of very young men will be quieted. But for America at war the one really imperative task is to get to France the maximum number of men at the earliest possible moment. What training we can give them while we are wait

made to yield about four billions, while the various taxes on corporations and excess profits proposed by the Ways and Means Committee can not yield more than two and three-quarter billions. Whence arises, then, the question whether the war profits tax or the excess profits tax would be the most productive! It is all a matter of the standard by which war profits are measured. British practice employed the earnings of pre-war years as the standard. Friends of the American profiteer are proposing as the standard, not the pre-war years 1911, 1912 and 1913, when average earnings were normal, but the years 1914, 1915, 1916, when earn

worth while, but we have given up the idea of holding men to more than a preliminary training here. They are much more quickly made into efficient soldiers in France. Now the Association for Universal Military Training would have us fill up our camps with three-quarters of a million men who could not under any conditions be sent off to France within a twelvemonth. And all for the sake of setting a precedent so that after the universal training on its merits. war it may not be necessary to argue the case for

we enjoyed as a busy neutral nation. How great a difference this makes is made clear by a comparison between the average earnings for the real pre-war period, $3,795,000,000 and the earnings of 1916, $8,766,000,000. The case is clear. If it is the average net income for 1914-1916 that is to be deducted from current net income before we

arrive at war profits, the yield from war profits taxation will be modest indeed. Accordingly we may expect all the force and ingenuity of the profiteers to be applied to the task of inducing Congress to fix 1914-1916 as the normal.

SOM

OMEBODY blundered in permitting the publication in America of London despatches intimating that Kerenski desires to come to America but is denied passports. We conceive of our international enterprise as essentially democratic in spirit and in method. Therefore we ought not to be exposed to the suggestion that a superior wisdom is shielding us against the risks of hearing an opinion on our Russian policy that may not coincide at all points with the opinions officially current. Let us remember that our Russian policy is not a completed work of art, but a mere seed out of which much that is unforeseeable may grow. We needed all the light that was to be had before we decided upon a military expedition to Vladivostok.

TH

Offensive

HE brilliant success of the Allied armies in crushing in the face of the Montdidier salient explains much that a few days ago a commentator found difficult to understand. It explains the speech in which von Kühlemann brought about his own fall by declaring the impossibility of military victory. Even at that time, when the Germans were at the height of their ostensible success, they apparently knew the hopelessness of their own enterprise. It explains the long delay which preceded the last disastrous German offensive. At the time no one knew enough to decide whether the delay was a sign of strength or of weakness. It is now proved to be a sign of weakness. The German High Command did not really possess the resources to continue the huge offensive operation, and there must have been divided counsels about when to stop and how far to go ahead. Finally, it explains the caving in of the German lines at the first indication of a strong counter-attack and the indecision which characterized German strategy during the week following General Foch's blow south of Soissons. As a consequence of their losses and the extension of their line they did not have enough troops to push home their offensive against an enemy which was being so heavily reenforced.