tion; pessimists themselves do not believe it. And when statesmen give utterance to it in the hope of startling the working-class into a desired course of conduct, they under-rate the intelligence of the working-class and the result of such oratory is far from what they could wish. Our national existence is as safe as it has been any time this century; indeed, it is safer, for its chief menace has received a terrible blow, and the Prussian superstition is exploded. All that can be urged is that we have an international job to finish; that in order to finish it properly and within a reasonable period we must work with a will and in full concord; and that if we eral public is all right, quite as all The War and Racial Progress [From the Morning Post of London, July 2, 1915] Major Leonard Darwin, in his presidential address on "Eugenics During and After the War" to the Eugenics Education Society at the Grafton Galleries yesterday, said that our military system seemed to be devised with the object of insuring that all who were defective. should be exempt from risks, whilst the strong, courageous, and patriotic should be endangered. Men with noble qualities were being destroyed, whilst the unfit remained at home to become fathers of families, and this must deteriorate the natural qualities of the coming generations. The chances of stopping war were small, and we must consider how to minimize its evils. If conscription were adopted future wars would produce less injury to the race, because the casualty lists would more nearly represent a chance selection of the population; though whether a conscript army would ever fight as well as our men were doing in France was very doubtful. The injurious effects of the war on all useful sections of the community should be mitigated. Military training was eugenic if the men were kept with the colours only for short periods. Officers must, of course, be engaged for long periods, and amongst them the birth rate was very low. An increase of pay would be beneficial in this respect, but only if given in the form of an additional allowance for each living child. In the hope of increasing the birth rate attempts were likely to be made to exalt the "unmarried wife," a detestable term against which all true wives should protest. If a change in moral standards was demanded in the hope that an increase in the habit of forming irregular unions would result in an increase in the population, that plea entirely failed because the desired effect would not thus be produced. A special effort ought now to be made on eugenic as well as on other grounds to maintain the high standards of home life which had ever existed in our race, and which had been in large measure the basis of our social and racial progress in the past. If we did not now take some steps to insure our own racial progress being at least as rapid as that of our neighbours, and if our nation should in consequence cease in future to play a great part in the noble and eternal struggle for human advancement, then the fault would be ours. By Russian Men of Letters A group of sixty-seven Russian writers and publicists, comprising the best men of letters of the nation, with the exception of Vladimir Korolenko, who is at present in France, have signed a reply to the tribute to the writers of Russia by English men of letters, a translation of which was printed in CURRENT HISTORY for February, 1915. The text of the reply, given below, is taken from the Moscow daily newspaper, Outro Rossii; its translation into English by Leo Pasvolsky appeared in the New York Evening Post of June 20th. W E have known you for a long time. We have known you since we Russians came to a communion with Western Europe and began to draw from the great spiritual treasury created by our brethren of Western Europe. From generation to generation we have watched intently the life of England, and have stored away in our minds and our hearts everything brilliant, peculiar, and individual, that has impressed itself upon the English word, the English thought, and the English life. We have always wondered at the breadth and the manifoldness of the English soul, in whose literature one finds, side by side, Milton and Swift, Scott and Shelley, Shakespeare and Byron. We have always been amazed by the incessant and constantly growing power of civic life in England; we have always known that the English people was the first among the peoples of the world to enter upon a struggle for civic rights, and that nowhere does the word freedom ring so proud and so triumphant as it does in England. With wonder and veneration, have we watched the English people, that combines the greatest idealism with the most marvellous creative genius, that constantly transforms words into deeds, aspirations into actions, thoughts and feelings into institutions, go onward, from step to step, reaching out into the heavens, yet never relinquishing the earth, higher and higher along its triumphant road, still onward in its work of creating the life of England. Kingdoms and peoples, cultures and institutions, pass away like dreams. But thoughts and words remain, whether they be of white men, or black, or yellow, whether they be of Jews or of Hellenes, whether they be inscribed on slabs of stone, or on boards of clay, or on strips of papyrus. Words and thoughts live to the present day; they still move us and uplift us, even though we have already forgotten the names of those who spoke them. And we know that only the winged words live on, the words that are intelligible to the whole of mankind, that appeal to the whole of humanity, to the common human mind, the common heart. We know the vast power of the English word. We know what a marvellous contribution the English writers have made to the life not of England alone, but to that of the whole world, the whole humanity. It is with a feeling of longstanding affection and veneration that we turn to the ancient book, called "England," whose pages never grow yellow, whose letters are never effaced, whose thoughts never become dim, whose new chapters bear witness to the fact that the book is still being written, that new pages are still being added, and that these new pages are permeated with that same bright and powerful spirit of humanity that illumines and enlivens the pages of the past. We feel proud because you have recognized the great individual worth of the Russian literature, and we are moved by your ardent expressions of sympathy and friendship. You scarcely know what Lord Byron was to us at the dawn of our literature, how our greatest poets, Poushkin and Lermontov, were swayed by him. You scarcely know to what an extent the Shakespearean Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, has become a part of our literature, how near to us is Hamlet's tragedy. We, too, pronounce the names of Copperfield and Snodgrass with a little difficulty, but the name of Dickens is as familiar to us and as near to our hearts as the names of some of our own writers. We trust, and we even permit ourselves to hope, that our friendship will not end on the fields of battle, but that our mutual understanding will continue to grow, as it lives on together with those sincere and heartfelt words, with which you have addressed us. We trust that it will be transformed into a spiritual unity between us, a unity based on the universal achievements of the spirit of humanity. We trust even further. We trust that evil will finally become extinguished in the hearts of men, that mutual ill-feeling will be bitter and poignant no longer, and that, when ears of corn will be (Signed) L. ANDREEV, U. BUNIN, V. VERESAEV, N. DAVYDOV, S. ELPATIEVSKY, I. IGNATOV, N. TELESHOV, I. SHMELEV, COUNT A. N. TOLSTOY, N. RUSANOV, F. KRIUKOV, A. GORNFELD, A. PIESHECHONOV, N. KAREYEV,. F. BATUSHKOV, L. PANTELEYEV, N. KOTLIAREVSKY, V. MIAKOTIN, OLNEM-TSEKHOVSKAYA, A. KONI, W. KRANIKHFELD, B. LAZAREVSKY, P. POTAPENKO, again fluttering upon the fields, mutilated by trenches and ramparts, and drenched in human blood, when wild flowers will begin to grow over the countless unknown graves, time will come, when the nations that are separated by such a tremendous gulf to-day, will come together again upon the one great road of humanity and will turn back once more to the great, universal words, that are common to all men. We trust, and we hope. Greetings to you. TH. SOLOGUB, T. SCHEPKINA-KUPERNIK, K. BARANTSEVICH, S. VENGEROV, P. MILIUKOV, A. PRUGAVIN, M. KOVALEVSKY, A. POSNIKOV, E. LETKOVA-SULTANOVA, D. OVSIANNIKO-KULIKOVSKY, D. MEREZHKOVSKY, Z. HIPPIUS, F. ZELINSKY, N. TCHAIKOVSKY, A. BLOK, E. TCHIRIKOV, A. PETRISCHEV, I. BIELOKONSKY, PRINCE A. SUMBATOV, W. FRITCHE, A. VESELOVSKY, W. NEMEROVICH-DANCHENKO, PRINCE E. TROUBETSKOY, I. SHPAZHINSKY, TH. KOKOSHKIN, M. ARTISIBASHEV, U. BALTRUSHAITIS, PRINCE D. SHAKHOVSKY, By William Archer Mr. Archer's article praising the Italian decision and purpose appeared originally in The London Daily News. German NE of the most beautiful and memorable of human experiences is to start, one fine morning, from some point in Switzerland or Tyrol and, in two or three days-or it may be in one swinging stretch-to tramp over an Alpine pass and down into the Promised Land below. It is of no use to rush it in a motor; you might as well hop over by aeroplane. In order to savor the experience to the full, you must take staff and scrip, like the Ritter Tannhäuser, and go the pilgrim's way. It is a joy even to pass from the guttural and explosive place names of Teutonia to the liquid music of the southern vocables-from Brieg to Domo d'Ossola, from Göschenen to Bellinzona, from St. Moritz to Chiavenna, from Botzen and Brixen to Ala and Verona. It is a still greater joy to exchange the harsh, staring colors of the north for the soft luminosity of the south, as you zigzag down from the bare snows to the pines, from the pines to the chestnuts, from the chestnuts to the trellised vineyards. And just about where the vineyards begin, you come upon two wayside posts, one of them inscribed "Schweiz " or "Oesterreich," the other bearing the magic word "Italia." If your heart does not leap at the sight of it you may as well about-turn and get you home again; for you have no sense of history, no love of art, no hunger for divine, inexhaustible beauty. For all these things are implicit in the one word, "Italy." Alas! the charm of this excursion has from of old made irresistible appeal to the northern barbarian. That has been Italy's historic misfortune. For certain centuries, under the dominance of Rome, she kept the Goths and Huns and Vandals aloof by what is called in India a "forward policy "—by throwing the outworks of civilization far beyond the Alpine barrier. But Rome fell to decay, and, wave upon wave, the barbarian-generally the Teuton, under one alias or anothersurged over her glorious highlands, her bounteous lowlands, and her marvelous cities. It is barely half a century since the hated Tedeschi were expelled from the greater part of their Cisalpine possessions; and now, in the fullness of time, Italy has resolved to redeem the last of her ravished provinces and to make her boundaries practically conterminous with Italian speech and race. The political and military aspects of the situation have been fully dealt with elsewhere; but a lifelong lover of Italy may perhaps be permitted to state his personal view of her action. While the negotiations lasted, her position was scarcely a dignified one. It seemed that she was willing, not, indeed, to sell her birthright for a mess of pottage, but to buy her birthright at the cost of complicity in monstrous crime. Neither Italy nor Europe would have profited in the long run by the substitution of “Belgia Irredenta" for "Italia Irredenta." But now that she has repudiated the sops offered to her honor and conscience, her position is clear and fine. She has rejected larger concessions, probably, than any great power has ever before been prepared to make without stroke of sword; and she has thrown in her lot with the Allies in no time-serving spirit, but at a point when their fortunes were by no means at their highest. This is a gesture entirely worthy of a great and high-spirited people. It is true that she had no guarantee for the promised concessions except the "Teutonica fides," which has become a byword and a reproach. But I am much mistaken if that was the sole or main motive that determined her resort to arms. She took a larger view. She felt that even if Germany, by miracle, kept her faith, the world, after a German victory, would be no place for free men to live in. She was not moved by the care for a few square miles of territory, more or less, but by a strong sense of democratic solidarity and of human dignity. After the events of the past ten months, she felt that, to a self-respecting man or nation, German hate was infinitely preferable to German love. It was, in fact, a patent of nobility. And now that Italy is ranked with us against the powers of evil, it becomes more than ever our duty to strain every nerve for their defeat. We are now taking our share in the guardianship of the world's great treasure house of historic memories and of the creations of genius. We have become, as it were, cotrustees of an incomparable, irreplaceable heritage of beauty. Italy has been the scene of many and terrible wars; but since she emerged from the Dark Ages I do not know that war has greatly damaged the glory of her cities. She has not, of recent centuries, had to mourn a Louvain or a Rheims. But if the Teuton, in his present temper, should gain any considerable footing within her bounds, the Dark Ages would be upon her once more. What effort can be too great to avert such a calamity! I am not by way of being versed in the secrets of Courts; but I recall today, with encouragement, a conversation I had some years ago with an ex-Ambassador to Italy (not a British Ambassador) who had been on intimate terms with the King, and spoke with enthusiasm of his Majesty's character. He told me of his bravery, his devotion to duty, his simple manners, his high intelligence. One little anecdote I may repeat without indiscretion. A Minister of Education said to my friend that when he had an interview with the King he felt like a schoolboy bringing up to an exacting though kindly master a half-prepared lesson; and when this was repeated to his Majesty, he smiled and said: "Ministers come and go, but I, you see, am always here." He merited far better than his grandfather (said my informant) the title of "il Re Galantuomo." Under such a Chief of State Italy may, with high hope and courage, set about her task of tearing away her unredeemed fringes from that patchwork of tyrannies known as the Austrian Empire. Who Died Content! [From the Westminster Gazette] Rex and Wilfred Winslow were the first men who died on the field of German South West Africa. The epitaph on the cross on the grave ran thus: "Tell England ye that pass this monument, That we who rest here died content." -DAILY NEWSPAPER. Far the horizon of our best desires Stretches into the sunset of our lives: The loins of such as, ardent, for her fought. If from the heights and depths it takes its name: Upon the proud lips of great men it sounds As if the clear note from the Heavens came; A word that, sea-like, shrinks and grows again; JOHN HOGBEN. |