class of people from a certain historian who has written of their immediate ancestors, and who, by the way, does Mr. Kipling the honor to quote him at the head of one of his chapters. After reading both, one is utterly amazed at the gross injustice of our critic or else the hopeless degeneracy of our rural folk. Says the learned historian: "Men worthy to be presidents and cabinet ministers, who only lacked the opportunity to become such, drove ox-teams from the Missouri to the Columbia. Warriors without a command walked between the plowhandles of old Marion, Linn, Yamhill, and Lane. Senators without the toga blew the fires of the forges, or plied the rustic industries of village and prairie in Clackamas or Polk or Multnomah. Bishops without the mitres preached sermons fit for metropolitan pulpits, or administered missionary cures in log school-houses and pioneer cabins. Orators and governors pruned fruit yards and planted vineyards in rural precincts. They were the best fruit of this splendid democracy of ours, which, by placing government in the hands of the people, trained thousands of men everywhere for higher service when the emergent hour called them forth for that service."

Nevertheless, aside from such contumacious comments on our citizenship, this chapter, descrip

tive of his salmon-fishing up the Clackamas, is the sole chapter in Kipling's "American Notes" that an American citizen who has any self-esteem or any pride of country can read without painfully experiencing an almost constant feeling of contempt for the prejudice, bigotry, littleness, and conceit of the author. In the heat of "the battle royal" he seems to forget for the time that he is in a land odious to him, and he gives us a description thrilling, interesting, full of little incidents, facetiously told. It may be that being the hero of the occasion may have caused him to forget his distemper, and put him in best humor. How we wish his whole book could have been so written! But we know better now what he thinks of us than if he had treated us with fulsome flattery or silent contempt.

Mr. Kipling, apparently ignoring the sudden desire of the great powers headed by the Czar for universal (if not everlasting) peace, expresses much surprise, notwithstanding he was editing a military gazette and should have been better posted on our weakness, at our nation's being "so temptingly spankable," as he terms the imaginary little task of our stern old British mammy over the sea. He has much to say about our weak coast defenses, which he seems not to have known till he personal

ly spied them out. This military critic, not unmindful of the “ars poetica," and perhaps recalling the important part such poets as old Archillycus played in satire and songs, battle and sieges, jeers at Bret Harte's idea by which he poetically styles San Francisco "the warder of two continents," and says: "When the city of Pekin steamed through the Golden Gate, I saw with great joy, that the blockhouse which guarded the entrance to 'the finest harbor in the world, sir,' could be silenced by two gunboats from Hong Kong with safety, comfort and despatch." So thought Cervera. But what does Mr. Kipling think now of the honor this "warder of two continents" has won for her country since the "Oregon" made her imperishable record at Santiago de Cuba, and the sons of the Golden State have so nobly done their part in laying hands on the Philippines? The one, a stately, powerful battle-ship, which makes a trip unparalleled for speed and distance while an anxious nation stands breathless for her fate, plows the billowy deep with ceaseless throb of ponderous engines in order that she may stand, in due time, panoplied in justice more than steel, like warrior David, before the haughty enemy of her country. The other, sons worthy of the splendid record of their fathers on many a hard won field, have added

fresh laurels to her glorious achievments. And for Mr. Kipling to talk of beholding with joy the weak defenses offered by this warder of two continents, to talk of a "blockhouse" measurement of her strength, is not so much the taunts of an enemy as it is, to use his own sarcastic words, the talk of "a child a very rude little child." It is the talk of one who sees a blockhouse as a plaything, of one, who sees the implements of war, but is blind to the quality of men handling them, who sees nothing of the skill, valor, and patriotism of the men behind the guns, and forgetful that history teaches the nations of the world that if one would know the hidden meaning of forts and arsenals on our American soil, the hidden meaning of our few battle-ships and the small standing army, he must read between the lines. Only to bigotry is it needful for us to add that it means: In peace, vox populi; in war, valor invincible. To nations whose jealousy and hereditary feuds render mighty armies and navies a necessary burden to their own people and a constant menace to the peace of neighboring empires, if not to themselves, our visible defenses in times of peace may seem a fit theme for ridicule. But while some satirical poet-soldier like Archillycus, who threw away his sword in battle, may "roll his eyes in fine

frenzy" and jeer at our helplessness, there is one aspersion with which the powers of the Old World can never upbraid us in the eyes of posterity. We heard the cry of an alien people and in the name of humanity hastened to drive the bloody Spaniard from his work of butchery and desolation; and, in justice to hundreds of thousands of our brave boys on both land and sea, we solemnly affirm that it is our belief that no devilish Turk could long have waged his fiendish warfare on helpless women and children, had Crete been Cuba, though our standing army had not contained one soldier, our coasts a solitary gun, or our navy a single battleship when first we heard their piteous cries. And, differ as we may about how armies should be disposed, or fed, camped and moved, differ as we may about our policy towards the peoples rescued from Spanish thralldom and degradation, we all feel that every loyal heart in the land to-day, save those only in homes made desolate by war, where sorrow broods over the loss of the loved one never to return, is palpitating with joy over the imperishable work of our rescuing army, our country's Salvation Army that went forth to preach to the haughty Spaniard a gospel that gave sight to their blind, made their deaf to hear, and their dumb to understand,