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camp that night. We found, in the morning, that it was made by young weasels-weasels almost as gentle as kittens, so little did they and their ancestors know of man and his treachery.

Practically the only sign of man, even on that portage, was his domesticated grasses. More faithful than his dog, they follow him into the wilderness-red clover and alsike clover and timothy and redtop. The clovers turn back first. Timothy tags on for a time longer. And when you are where redtop no longer follows the tracks of man across the portages the wilderness is absolute.

And there, where all marks of man end, the loons begin. Almost the incarnation of the wilderness, they would make those boundary waters well worth while if all the other charms were gone -but the loons would go, of course, with the other charms. We had unusual opportunity to study them. Bill could imitate their call so accurately that they would come, searching through the little waves, very close to our canoe. But Bill never could remember how to make the call until the loon did it first. Those that kept silence, therefore, we could not conjure.

But the realest witchery of the loons was not in those that laughed and cried by day upon the broad waters. It would come late at night, when the camp-fire had burned to a glow, when the last pipe was almost smoked, when no shadow of sound existed in earth or air or water. Then, from some far lagoon, would float that other soft and pleasing call, the lullaby of the loon, hardly a sound at all, but just enough to make the silence audible.

The next day we were in big water, on Emerald Lake. In the afternoon rain threatened, and we made camp early on a stony point. That was the beginning of our inability to pitch tents with stakes, so thin is the leaf-made soil, so near the rock. We had to tie to trees and blueberry bushes and little stunted. cedars in the cracks.

We found near camp next morning some really fine blueberries, and the Professor and I picked enough for two or three meals for the party. While we were doing it he gave me a bit of interesting information. "The few Indians who once lived in this region," he said, "had no vegetable food except blueberries and wild rice." Incidentally, we had brought along some wild rice, harvested by Indians, sold by the outfitter, and-in camp, at least-it is much superior to the ordinary kind.

On the rocks above this camp some chipmunks barked about my feet and

told me to go away. I found signs of moose under the balsams by a little bay where I went for a swim. Several times we found such signs. But the Professor was never hopeful that we would see a moose, and we never did. There were no swamps, he explained. And, though that has nothing to do with moose, there were no sand beaches. In the nine days we did not see as much sand as would fill a chicken's crop. Those lakes are too new, the complete glaciation too recent-only a few hundreds of thousands of years ago, perhaps the wave wash too slight to have piled up sand beaches as yet.

THE

HE next day we were on water surrounded by real woods, fairly big pine and spruce and balsam, the first that we had seen. We made a portage, a mile long and extremely rough, on which there were some wonderful trees.

On that portage I heard the song of the winter wren, a privilege not before vouchsafed to me, a privilege not vouchsafed to any whose bird hunting has not extended north of the line of the Great Lakes. My mind went back to the time when I first saw this least and loneliest of the wrens. It was a late fall twilight, under the shadow of the Overton Knobs near Nashville, when a party of us were returning from a long bird tramp. The little fellow flashed out of the foliage, and one of my party shot it. Such license is granted to ornithologists -for the benefit, the law reads, of science.

On that portage we met a canoeful of wilderness farers coming out, and sent letters by them, Mack and I, to our families. They told us, those outcoming wilderness farers, of a particularly fine camp site which they had left, up Otter Track Lake—one of the prettiest lakes that I saw-and we made it that night, by hard paddling.

And when we had made it, Mack did not want to camp there. It had been too recently used, he said, and the skunks might get us. The Professor sniffed. "It's by odds the best campingplace we have seen, or will see," he said, "and there are not enough skunks in this whole wilderness to musk a midget." Mack paddled away across the bay looking for another camp site, but he did not find it, and we camped in the old one, and no skunk came. Some Canada jays did come and feast on our bacon rinds. They know, those wise birds, much better than skunks do where food is likely to be. No doubt they had eaten of the bacon rinds of all parties that had camped by that fireplace for years.

The Outlook for

Those wilderness fireplaces-stones piled up with a green birch pole across on forked stakes and pothooks made of forked limbs are frequently to be found.

Only one night did we fail to find a camp site with a fireplace already made. Practically the only marks of human hands in all that region, they are well smoked and old., More than two hundred years old, some of them, perhaps. For that wilderness was no more a wilderness at the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century than it is at the end of the first quarter of the twentieth. A queer feeling comes over one from the realization that by these rocks where he squats and fries bacon a French voyageur probably squatted and fried bacon when this was no more wilderness than all the rest of North America.

T

HE next day was one of many portages from one small lake to another, of many lifts over beaver dams, for we had decided to take a short cut to Saganagons, leaving Cache Bay and Saganaga, on the regular route, to the east. The rocks were rougher, the portages steeper, but there was the reward of a profusion of plants. No end of clintonia, the brilliant, blue-berried plant named in honor of De Witt Clinton. I found a handful of raspberries, one lone strawberry, a dewberry or two, a little wisp of currants, a fair-sized patch of thimbleberries, queer cousins of the raspberry-not enough to have helped out the d supply of the Indians who once were there, but enough to give a pilgrim a taste. Partridgeberries, too, were everywhere-of no service to man, but fine for birds, if there only had been any birds there.

And there were birds there, as it turned out. Suddenly I was in the midst of a flock of warblers of several species, through with their family duties, no doubt, and ready to start south. Instinctively, I listened for the chickadee. He is the bell-wether of the warbler flock, queerly enough, as it feeds southward in the fall. And, sure enough, the chickadee piped up-busy, there in those northern woods and waters, herding his flock together for the long drive to another summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

We portaged into Saganagons, into a marsh. And redwing blackbirds were calling. A kingfisher flashed across the channel. One spot in that wilderness had its fair population of birds.

We found a likely-looking camping site on a cliff, and paddled toward it. Bill, looking through the glasses, said that there was a bear waddling about

NEX

EXT morning we broke camp two hours earlier than usual, in order to make up time. But we made up no time. A sudden thunder-storm, with wind, came upon us, and we were glad to seek shelter in a little bay and to land on its shores. Here, I think, was the spot with more the feel of wildness to it than any other that I saw in all that welter of wildness. The trees were all conifers and fairly large. All over the ground were graves of trees-mounds of moss, with all the wood that had once lain beneath them completely rotted away, so that one's feet went down half knee-deep. Alf and the Professor sheltered on the other side of the bay, in woods not so fine as ours. But a porcupine sat in a tree above their heads, motionless as long as the rain poured down. When the shower was over, he started eating buds, and we left him. making a hearty breakfast.

A step on the stairs from Saganagons to Kanipi

That porcupine completes the list of the four-footed things that I saw during nine days in the wilderness of the boundary waters.

UT of Saganagons Lake we went into Saganagons River, a stream of many beautiful waterfalls with portages around them-hogbacks, and hard to make. By the time we reached the last of them we had left Alf and the Professor far behind-not that we were

rest from the portaging. Perhaps one other place awed me as much. We had camped the night before among the falls, and the Professor and I sat late by the fire, and the moon, almost at the full, hung southward over a woods that by daylight had been fire-scarred and ugly. Under the moon, with the falls in the foreground, it made a wonderful picture of loneliness and remoteness from human kind.

better paddlers, but merely that they, IT

having the camera, found many pictures to make. Mack and Bill, while we waited, went fishing below the falls. And on the portage, among black spruce trees, on a bed of boughs that some other wilderness farer had left, with the roar of the falls in my ears, I stretched out and went to sleep. I awoke with a wonderful picture framed before my eyes a glorious old white pine on the other side of the falls and, for an instant, an eagle hanging motionless above iteagle or osprey, I had not time to make certain which, and the Profesor said that both were rare in that region.

Here was the spot whose beauty struck nearest home to my heart. No doubt there were other spots as beautiful, but at this one I had opportunity to

T was at this camp that the Professor developed the habit of kicking over the coffee-pot. He did it with wonderful regularity and precision for the next three meals, until I hit upon the happy expedient of setting out the pot for him to kick over before the coffee was made. After that he refused to have anything to do with the cooking, and even declined, at the next camp, to share my tent, though the ground was so stony that he could not put up his own.

He led me to think that this stubbornness was related to the coffee-pot incident, but afterwards explained that he wanted to be able to tell his wife that he had slept on the rocks and dreamed of her. I think he meant to be complimentary. He was not, however, complimentary of the mosquitoes the next morning.

52

The weather had turned warm in the night, and he could not keep his head covered.

Well, we paddled on down into Lake Kanipi-there is more to the name, five syllables more, but I am not up to the spelling, and, anyhow, Kanipi is the familiar diminutive and across Agnes, where we had our troubles. Paddling Agnes may be easy enough ordinarily, but we did it against the wind. Then across a chain of alliterative small lakes -Silence and Sultry and Summer, etc. -and so finally, after other camps, back into Basswood, where, after breakfast on a Sunday morning, the chug-boat picked us up by appointment and brought us back to the fringe of civilization. For some time I had been somewhat homesick for several things. One was

the reflection of my own face. 'A man's face ordinarily means little to him, but when he goes without seeing it for nine days he begins to wonder whether he is himself or not. And it never occurred to me to take a mirror into the wilderness. It turned cut, however, that Mack took one, and we all shaved before coming out.

But, most of all, I was homesick for the sight of a good, honest hardwood tree -oak or elm or hickory. A few black ash there are in the wilderness—a little clump of dwarfs every fifty miles or so -and some shrubs called moose maple; but none of the sturdy trees that hold their limbs straight out. If you have lived with that kind of trees all your life, you cannot imagine until you try it how you will miss them. So, home

The Status of Foreign Missions in the Pacifie

W

E heard much during the Conference, particularly from the Chinese, of the criticism

of religious missions in the Orient. Smacking too much of foreign interference, too Western in their atmosphere, too superior in their attitude, too doctrinal and denominational, too reluctant to trust ecclesiastical authority to native people, too unaware of the spiritual values in other religions; and, above all, judging by the Great War of the Christian nations, too insincere! In China, where this attitude especially prevails among certain classes, it is, of course, a part of the whole current of revolt against Westernism. None were more ready at the Conference than the wiser of the missionaries to confess the faults of the mission movement and the shortcomings of Western civilization, but it appeared, after full discussion, that these criticisms, while partly true, are more or less superficial and pertain to individuals, and that the real criticism lies deeper.

In the important field of the more

primitive peoples, for example, in the South Sea Islands, where Christianity and advancing civilization have eliminated war, infanticide, cannibalism, witchcraft, tabu and the whole fundamental psychology of fear, and have slowly, even though in some places blunderingly, substituted the leadership of industrial and economic betterment and intelligence and the principles of pure and undefiled religion, the results have been beyond eulogy. Certainly this is true in the Hawaiian Island group, where American missionaries have established an unbeatable record for sacrifice and religious and social service. And the same appears to be widely true in the other islands of the Pacific.

In countries like China and Japan, however, it was declared in the Conference that some fundamental changes of authority and mission philosophy must soon be made. Everybody seemed to believe that many of the missionaries who have recently come out of China would go back and be gladly received by the masses of the Chinese people. But dogma will count less and less and mere authoritative ecclesiastical organization from without will count less and

less. The Chinese and Japanese are not primitive peoples. They are pretty wise folks. China has been caught in the swirl of arrested development, but she is getting out of it, and she has ages of certain kinds of sagacity behind her. The simple spirit of religion and social service will never be completely out of date, but what China is groping for, it ap pears, is a dynamic, creative religious philosophy such as centers around the ideas and the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. The simple conception of Jesus, of a personal relation to a Father in heaven, or to a reality of creative love, was lost out of China's thought and experience a thousand years ago, and with it there passed from the Chinese people, said the prophet representative Koo from China, the creative imagination and purpose whose absence helps to account as much as anything else for the arrested development of a population of four hundred millions.

And as for Japan, let Christian missions take a leaf from the note-book of Archbishop Nicolai, of the Russian Orthodox Church in Japan, as related in a pamphlet for the Honolulu Conference prepared by Harlan P. Beach. Nicolai's

September 14, 1927

heartfelt interest in the land of Japan had made a great impression upon the masses of the Japanese people before the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War. During the strenuous months of that

war, when all Russians were execrated in Japan and their shops often looted, the Cathedral of Nicolai was sacrosanct. No people could fail to respond to the superlative strategy of this man. At the beginning of the conflict he sent word to his followers everywhere throughout Japan:

I hope there will be no change in our Church through the outbreak of the war. Evangelists must propagate the Master's Gospel, students must attend the Mission School as usual, and I will devote myself to the translation of the Prayer-Book, with my assistant Nakae. And if an Imperial Proclamation of war is issued, your members must pray for the triumph of Japan; and when the Japanese army has conquered the Russian forces, you must offer to God a prayer of thankfulness. This is the obligation laid on the Orthodox Christian in his native country. Our Lord Jesus Christ teaches us patriotism and loyalty. Christ himself shed tears for Jerusalem. This was because of his patriotism, and you must follow in your Master's steps. I prayed as usual to-day in the Cathedral, but henceforth I will not take part in the public prayers. This is not for the reason that it might be dangerous for me to appear in the Cathedral, but for the reason that until now I prayed for the victory and the peace of the Japanese Emperor, but now in case of war I cannot pray as a Russian subject that our native country should be conquered by an enemy. I have, as you also have, an obligation to my country; therefore I am glad to see that you realize your obligation to your country.

Just after the Russo-Japanese War Nicolai stood upon the platform of the Tokyo Young Men's Christian Association and in eloquent Japanese, which had become a second mother tongue, told six hundred and twenty-five men and women delegates from twenty-five nations who were attending the Conference of the World Student Christian Federation that he had come to love Yamato-damashii (Japanese spirit), founded upon the purity of Shinto, the love of Buddhism, and the morality of Confucianism. These were the schoolmasters to lead the people to God, whom they did not understand as Father!

This seems to me to be a consummate example of modesty and simplicity and sagacity which the missionary men and

women of other countries would do well to emulate.

Philippine Independence

THE

HERE were at Honolulu representatives of all important factions and points of view in the Philippine Islands, our American wards falling to us from the Spaniards, with an area of 114,000 square miles and a population now estimated at eleven millions. When we took them over, they were the helpless victims of preventable disease; they had just lost in an epidemic of rinderpest over eighty per cent of their work animals. They had neither education, sanitation, nor economic development. The Filipinos have proved quick to learn, and now there are some twenty-seven thousand teachers in the schools, instructing over a million children. Hundreds of students are enrolled in the universities. While the percentage of absolute illiteracy has thus been greatly reduced, comparatively few of the people are as yet interested in anything connected with public affairs, as is evidenced by the total circulation in the Philippines of all periodicals, daily, weekly, and monthly, which in 1924, according to the report to the Conference by Judge Fisher, from whose speech these facts are taken, is approximately 150,000 for the population of eleven million-one paper or periodical for each eighty per

sons.

The climate of the Philippines is reasonably good, but it is an unceasing struggle of American sanitary science with the tropical diseases which affect men and animals alike. The economic development of these islands is lagging relatively far behind Porto Rico, Hawaii, and Cuba. If the resources of the Philippines were as well developed as those of Porto Rico and Cuba, their per capita export production would be about five times what it is. Capital has not been adequately attracted to the country, although there is richness of natural resource. While the Philippines have absorbed already about two hundred millions of capital since the American occupation, Cuba, with a third of the area, has absorbed a billion and a half of American and British capital. The reason appears to be found in the uncertainty about the political future of the country. Now Philippine products are admitted to the American markets free of duty. If it were certain that this would continue under an orderly government, capital would undoubtedly flow freely, and both the political and economic organizations of the country would be advanced. Of course, it is

53

clear that in no country can there be proper political development unless there is sound and expanding economic development underlying it.

It seems to be the independence issue which more than anything else is retarding progress. This issue to a certain extent we inherited, but it has grown with the growing enlightenment of large num bers of the population with respect to our own American domestic ideals and standards of political freedom. It has been accelerated by the unfortunate Harrison régime under the Wilson Administration and by the unfortunate preamble in the Jones Act for the islands. This preamble and this régime carried natural implications to the Philippines which it is impossible justly to fulfill as the Philippines interpret them. Both the preamble and the régime presumed a too rapid rate of progress in local responsibility and control. They represent democracy on the loose. They took no account of the differences in the stage of social evolution among the peoples of the earth. The conflict with GovernorGeneral Wood grew almost entirely out of the necessity of the executive authority in the islands once more exercising the powers inherent in the office which had been abdicated by Wood's prede

cessor.

After taking account of all the testimony from the various witnesses who appeared before the American group in Honolulu, my interpretation is that there is not in the Philippine Islands anything like a responsible electorate, and will not be for many years. There may never be if the normal development is checked and baffled by constant agitation over the independence issue. There appears not to be the slightest doubt that the Filipino leaders correctly and honestly represent the desire for immediate independence on the part of all articulate intelligent Filipinos, and that there has been wide and acceptable propagation of the idea through the mass of the population. The islands are saturated with it. A yearly National Prayer Day for the emancipation of the country has been established shrewdly for the 22d of February, and the following are paragraphs from the first National Prayer offered in 1925:

"Almighty God, Father of all Nations, Fountain of all strength and mercy, we thy people come unto thee in this hour of danger and distress. Hide not thy face from this nation, we beseech thee. Do thou pour out thy holy comfort upon our afflicted souls. We are a weak people, but thou art our Refuge and our Deliverer."

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"We entreat thee, O most Gracious Father, stay thou the hand that would smite our liberties. Send forth thy Spirit unto our rulers across the sea and so touch their hearts and quicken their sense of justice that they may in honor keep their plighted word to us."

The pupils in the Philippine schools write many essays. One of them was reported to me at the Conference as follows: The theme taken by this pupil was "The Cow." "The Cow," said the little Filipino, "is an animal which has four legs, one on each corner. She also gives milk-but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

From the testimony offered in Honoiulu, it appears that the Philippines have nothing like a responsible electorate as we understand it, and that unless we mean to turn supinely back after having put our hands to the plow, they must wait and we must wait until there are in the Filipino population a far larger number of personal centers of intelligent public control, and particularly a far larger number of centers of financial intelligence for the conduct of the public business. In the meantime, if there is anything which will bring us more closely into sympathy with what I believe to be the genuine sincerity of the Filipino people about independence, it should be done. Our contacts hitherto have probably been too largely military, and imposed from above. A more sensitive civil rule and perhaps an unofficial conference of Americans and Filipinos, representing the leading public bodies of the mainland and the islands, might lead to a cool consideration of the Philippine problem of value to us and to them. My impression is that when the time for safe independence comes in the Philippines, the Filipinos themselves will recoil from it in any except a modified form of something like dominion status. They will catch the vision of hundreds of millions of the people of the earth looking eagerly towards America as a haven of refuge, and kept from it only by drastic immigration barriers. The Filipinos will, I think, finally prefer to remain in the happy circle of American welfare and reasonable freedom.

The Rising Tide of Peoples THE

HE movement for independence in the Philippines seems to me to be a part of the tide of rising recognition of the needs and rights of humanity throughout the whole Pacific area. In the islands of the South Seas, among the teeming millions of China, more and more in the social, economic, and political policies of Japan, and of course

The Outlook for

supremely in those countries of the British Commonwealth which guard the southern and the northeast shore, as well as in our own United States, it is the same tide; and it must more and more be taken into account by the foreign offices of Europe and America.

Peace and the American Department of State

I

CAME away from Honolulu with a conviction that has been a belief with me for some time, that the United States is much better organized for war than for peace. Under present world conditions, no doubt we should be properly concerned about an adequate army and navy for defense. We spend vast sums upon organization for war-fifteen to twenty millions upon a single scouting cruiser of the first class. In both the army and the navy we have boards of leadership and strategy which are able and extremely sensitive to world currents of hostile opinion. The Department of State at Washington seems not to be so sensitively manned. It has issued within the last eight or nine months two statements about China of sound import and great importance. But they have not registered either in this country or China or about the world as the British statements have registered. Even though we employ its diplomatic resources in time of war, the Department of State is our bulwark of diplomacy for peace. Yet we overwork it. We underpay it. Some divisions of it are more noteworthy than others. It is necessary frequently to bring in career men from the field to man it effectively. Not long ago the Department badly needed an expert of a certain type, but the salary of $5,600 a year was not to be had. The Department worried along without him, and when it finally succeeded in getting the funds, the man had gone elsewhere. Shooting $5,600 into target practice is wise economy in preparation for war, but $5,600 is an extravagance in the preparation for peace! We spend only $2,000,000 a year for central purposes in Washington connected with the functioning of our Department of State, and only a few millions more for all purposes whatsoever connected with the Department throughout the world. I wonder that our foreign policy is as effective as it is. It seems to me that Congress, in sympathetic collaboration with our foreign office, should obtain a careful survey of the needs of that vital department of government and by reorganization and adequate appropriation strengthen it to the advantage of the country and the peace of the world.