THE POPE AND THE NOVELIST A REPLY TO MR. RICHARD BAGOT 'POUR vivre tranquille il faut vivre loin des gens d'église,' says a witty Frenchman. There is a certain amount of truth in this for a particular class of minds. The Church's office is to teach and, in her own province, to rule her children; she does the work of conversion. But suppose a man enters into that relation with the Church which is understood by the term ' becoming a convert,' and then sets to work to convert her, it is pretty sure that his life will not be very peaceful. There will be friction at every point; nothing will please him; nothing will be done rightly. From Pope down to curate there--will be surely something amiss which he will want to set right. So the convert finds himself always at loggerheads with his bishops and pastors, who object to being thrown out of their office and submitting to him as a magistrate and master. Suum cuique,' which, being interpreted, means, 'Let the cobbler stick to his last.' I have heard of a convert who was anxious to know what was his exact position in the Church which he felt he had honoured by joining. Your exact position in the Church?' quoth the padre. That's easy enough to decide. Kneeling before the altar and sitting before the pulpit. Some do not realise the lesson that they get more from the Church than she does from them. The favour, I hold, is all on her side when she receives them into communion and gives them what they cannot find elsewhere. Hence it happens that such persons who have failed to grasp the first principles of submission to a teacher and ruler, when they find that they are not accepted at their own valuation, do one of two things. After a period of restiveness they either lapse or become that peculiar specimen of humanity a 'bored' convert. Mr. Richard Bagot himself remarks: 'It is not easy to feel religious when you are feeling bored.' For such the only remedy 'pour vivre tranquille' is to live far from us 'gens d'église.' But when did the moth ever forsake the candle when once it had felt the fascination? I will not for a moment say that the laity, hereditary Catholics or neophytes, have not got their rights, nor will I say that these rights have been, or always are, respected. But this is a very different position from that of adopting an attitude of perpetual girding against The Japanese Soldier on the March. BY ADACHI KINNOSUKE. THE EDITOR OF "THE FAR EAST" AS- WISE woman-or was it a foolish man who con Afided so grave a secret to the gossips world? has said that the shortest cut to a man's heart is through his stomach. That way, too, may lie the fate of a great battle, the destiny of a nation. It was not yesterday that the thinking end of the Nippon army found this out. The latter days of 1903 were dark with ominous foreshadowings. Indeed, a great and terrible war was a certainty in the minds of most military men of Nippon. The question of carrying food and guns over the Korean roads and into Manchuria commanded their serious attention-much more so than the prophecy of the Novoe Vremya, which told us that Russia would crush us even as a cannonball might crush an empty eggshell. The Muscovite newspaper's bombast was matched by a subsequent remark of Russia's greatest commander, General Kuropatkin, who is reported to have said something about signing the treaty of peace in the Mikado's palace at Tokio. May I be allowed to express my intense desire to see a tinted photograph of so heroic a scene? THE MAN WHO IS DRIVING RUSSIA When the thought of a great struggle with Russia in Korea and Manchuria was quite young, the brains at the head of our army were seriously engaged on a successful plan of conquering the most stubborn enemies we should have to overcome in such a campaign-namely, the Korean and Manchurian roads. It might have been thought that other things would engage their attention. Russia, the census reports declare, has a hundred and thirty million people; we have not quite forty-six millions. Russia has an army of five million men, on a war footing; we reckoned only four hundred and twenty thousand. The area of Russia is more than eight million square miles; that of Nippon, less than a hundred and fifty thousand. Even the most friendly among our western critics were frank enough to say that the vast resources of Russia, and the sheer numbers of her people, would be enough to drive us into the sea, if not to wipe Nippon off the map; but all these kindly admonitions did not persuade our statesmen to lose a single moment of sleep. It is quite evident, however, that they lost more than a night of good slumber over the solution of that difficult problem, the transportation of supplies over the roads of Korea and Manchuria. The all-important question with the Nippon army was how to carry provisions, arms and ammunition to the scene of THE LITTLE TWO-WHEELED CART WITH WHICH THE JAPANESE ARMY HAS CONQUERED THE ROADS This and the other engravings illustrating the present article are from photographs by Lewis, Yokohama. Do you remember how the combined armies of the leading powers of the world made their historic march from Tien-tsin to Peking at the time of the Boxer troubles, four years ago? Do you remember that the men and officers of the western powers looked upon the transportation facilities of the Nippon army with unconcealed mirth? It was a joke among the soldiers of other nations that our transportation facilities were planned on so small a scale. These superior critics said: "After all, with all their imitative cleverness, the Japanese cannot get building bridges and temporary roads, which the heavy four-mule wagons of the western armies came along and smashed. Our engineers built them again, and instead of a flood of profanity, which our western friends expected, they were greeted with a smiling courtesy that completely melted the hardness of their hearts. And long before they reached Peking they were singing a different tune. On that historic march the Nippon soldiers cleared the way and stood the brunt of the fighting. It was all the western troops could do to keep up with |
