ian legends into "The Tales of the Dimbovitza," which for beauty of expression remains unrivalled among folk-lore tales. A bibliography of her writings would include over thirty books, besides hundreds of magazine articles. Her book on aphorisms, "The Thoughts of a Queen," was accorded a medal of honor by the French Academy. Such diversified literary talent, powerful in every phase, is rarely found.

Her work begins at four every morning, and often lasts until midnight. She embroiders exquisitely, paints miniatures on ivory, is a fine musician, having been a pupil of Rubinstein and Clara Schumann, at brilliant conversationalist, an accomplished linguist, speaking fluently six languages and understanding as many more. A poem written in native German is often read by her in English or French before an audience without previous preparation of translation. Founding schools, hospitals, and asylums, encouraging the peasant woman to embroider and the men to cultivate the mulberry-tree, a liberal patron of the arts, an architect and adviser of a nation, Elizabeth has known no rest in her reign of twenty-five years.

Although the national religion is Greek, the Queen has been foremost in building a German Lutheran church. By nature deeply religious, her devotion is shown in acts as much as by formal attendance at divine services. The walls and stained-glass windows of the church are covered by inscriptions, all written by the royal hand.

All her revenues, except those required for necessities, even the large sums received from the work of her versatile pen, are devoted to charities. The ideal charity carried on at this time is Segenhaus, the ancestral castle on the Rhine, which, with its magnificent forest, was inherited by the

Queen from her mother, who died some two years since.

Having reached the highest position which the ambitions of a woman could desire, Elizabeth shows no vainglory in being Queen. She continues to wear a crown only in an endeavor to consummate the plans for the advancement of her adopted country. No portion of Europe is richer in fertile soil and natural resources. This Queen would renounce her throne, live in a peasant's hut, attend the flocks among the Carpathians, if thereby she might bring happiness and prosperity to her people.

She lost heart when her only child, the Princess Marie, was borne to eternal rest in the beautiful park of Cotroceni. Her ardent poetic nature was centred in the lovely idol whose sweet presence she enjoyed for only four years, and she was crushed with unutterable grief, which has expressed itself in all her poetry and every subsequent action of life. But duty, love of humanity, loyalty to the King, whose genius, industry, and heroism she admires, incited her to the accomplishment of the manifold works which have enriched her life. She was at Plevna when the heroic Carlos led the armies of Russia and Roumania. against Turkey in an engagement which won the admiration of the world. In those trying hours she was. in the field of carnage administering to the wants of the dving, and from her private purse providing for the care of hundreds.

Is it any wonder that throughout the kingdom her loyal subjects call her "Mama Regina"? How a Queen of Northern blood, born in another land, educated to a life more Occidental than a residence in Roumania could possibly inspire, can be so devoted to an adopted people is a mystery. Yet she loves Roumania more than her fatherland.

author, and a growing interest in Free Trade.

It is given to few to unite such knowledge of world-wide history with accurate acquaintance with a special period as John Morley. Here, too, is all that subtle sympathy and keen, though kindly, analysis of the secret springs of character which is seen at its best in his late life of Mr. Gladstone. And now that he has visited our shores and everywhere met with warmest welcome, we turn with added interest to all things from his pen.

"He does not conceive it his task," he tells us in his preface, "to compile a polemical handbook" for fiscal con

troversy. Yet here are hardest facts for fiscal study, with, besides, such clear light shed on the common life of Corn Law days as vivifies what else were but dry and dead statistical information. This book gives a complete history of the triumph of freetrade principles over the old Corn Laws. There can, we think, be no question that to Richard Cobden, more than to any other man, England owes her present commercial supremacy. Indeed, one of his admirers declares that he was " the greatest benefactor of mankind since the inventor of printing."

It is an interesting study to trace the development of the poor Sussex farmer-boy into the greatest economical leader of the age.

Born in the summertime of 1804, Richard Cobden was of ancestry traceable back to the seventeenth century. All his schooling he received at a Yorkshire Dotheboys Hall, of which he could never after endure to speak.

He began business as a warehouse clerk in London, and soon after as a traveller for the house.

At fifteen he entered an uncle's London warehouse, embarking thus upon a remarkably successful business career. But he was meant for more

for

than making money. "Sometimes," he says, "I ask what is all this yearning for? . . . Surely not money; I do not think the possession of millions would greatly alter my habits of expense." Nor was this forecast unconfirmed. Foregoing, afterwards, every private consideration, he abides still one of the very best examples of Britain's publicspirited men.

In his earliest undertakings there is never forgetfulness of the larger life. "When immersed in the first pressing anxieties of his new business in Manchester, he wrote to his brother in London, Might we not in the winter

instruct ourselves a little in mathematics? . . . I have a great disposition, too, to know a little of Latin.'

He had literary ambition, studied French, and wrote a play, which was rejected, "luckily for me," he says, "or I should have been a vagabond all the rest of my life." He made himself acquainted with the greatness of Cervantes, the geniality of Le Sage, the sweetness of Spenser, the splendid majesty of Burke, no less than with the general course of European history in the past, and the wide forces that were then actually at work in the present.

With two other young men he began business on a capital of £1,000, and in two years were trusted by a Manchester house to the extent of £40,000. The confidence was not misplaced, the business prospered, and soon Cobden travelled in its interest and in the pursuit of health, in Europe, America, Egypt, and the Levant.

The murderous misrule that has ever characterized Turkish government stirred him to the heart's core. From the island of Scio he writes, "Of nearly a hundred thousand persons on the island in the month of May, not more than seven hundred were left alive at the end of two months."

And this wild work still goes on; goes on, too, simply because of the jealous greed of powers called Christian!

"The Crescent is still exalted,

The cruel Turk holdeth sway,
The Christ they so long rejected,
Calls us to duty to-day.
Bids us be tender, my brothers,

Quit us like Christian men!
Why stand we waiting for others,

Why yield as we yielded then?

Athens touched touched him with her charms, forgetting the petty present

66

in the everywhere awakened memories of her splendid past. What a genius," he says, "and what a taste had those people!"

"Half the educated world of Europe is now devoting more thought to the ancient affairs of those Liliputian states, the squabbles of their tribes, the wars of their villages, the geography of their rivulets and hillocks, than they bestow upon the modern history of the United States, and the charts of the mighty rivers and mountains of the New World."

This is not the estimate of the political economist only, but of the healthy, modern-minded man. We have turned too much aside from those fields of living issues wherein the Greek spirit was touched to its finest issues, and have conned more carefully the mere verbal peculiarities of that old people than caught their spirit. Too many of our best youth have been singing "Arms and the Man," whilst everywhere about them have been enacted the nobler epics of "Tools and the Man."

After a six months' absence, Cobden returned with a splendid working knowledge of a national policy.

"The cardinal fact that struck his eyes," says Morley, "was the great population that was gathering in the new centres of industry in the North of England, in the factories, and mines, and furnaces, and cyclopean foundries which the magic of steam had called into being.'

"The moral force of the masses,' he says, "lies in the temperance movement, and I confess I have no faith in anything apart from that movement for the elevation of the working classes."

Cobden's earliest speeches were made at Clithero on behalf of the young. In 1838, amid the press of the organizing of the Anti Corn Law Association, he writes a friend in

Edinburgh, “I hope you will join us in a cry for schoolmasters as a first step to Radicalism." Popular education had been the most important of all social objects in his mind from the first." Certainly had he lived to see the grave state of England to-day on account of this educational question, when hundreds of her most loyal and lofty-minded sons are being sent to prison for conscience's sake—a condition of things unparalleled since the Stuart regime-he had taken Bright's ground, "that no purely ecclesiastical institution should be paid for out of the public taxes."

No statesman could think long, as Cobden did on the "Condition of England Question," without confronting the great evil of intemperance. In 1849 he wrote, "The temperance question really lies at the root of all social and political progression in this country. I am not one who likes to laud the Anglo-Saxon race as being superior to all others in every quality. But give me a sober Englishman, possessing the truthfulness common to his country, and the energy SO peculiarly his own, and I will match him for being capable of equalling any other man in the every-day struggle of life."

Only by remembering the tremendous strides the temperance cause has made these last fifty years, then recalling Cobden's passion for other pressing reforms, the friends of which would be sacrificed by such pronouncement on temperance, can we adequately appreciate his stand.

But even the Condition of England Question" was not the horizon. of his hopes. Neither did he simply "think in continents," or nurse the poor ambition to paint the world's map red. His were wider thoughts and far more worthy visions. For continents are bounded, and, at broadest, are but small affairs if small men

But principles know

dwell therein. no limitations, nor cease, if good, to be praiseworthy, even outside the Empire.

In this healthful world-wide outlook he notes that "vulgar kind of patriotic sentiment" that delights in war. "What Cobden sought," says his biographer, "was to nourish that nobler and more substantial kind of patriotism, which takes a pride in the virtue and enlightenment of our citizens," the patriotism that responds to clarion calls for fighting unto death the evils that unnerve a nation's manhood or womanhood; a patriotism that "takes a pride. in the widest success of our institutions, in the beneficence of our dealings with less advanced possessions, and in the lofty justice and independence of our attitude to other nations."

How poor and shrunken a thing beside such sentiment as this is that loudly boasting Imperialism so common to-day! For it is "the moral sentiment, more than the L.S.D. of the matter" that is back of such magnificent planning as was Cobden's; and no Imperialism could allure him. that conflicted with the larger conception of a Christian world. No wonder that he "had to run the gauntlet of the small wits of the House who amused themselves at his expense and tittered at the very word arbitration.'

In his later years "his activity was principally directed to two objects: the improvement of international law.

and the limitation of expenditure upon unneeded schemes of national defence." Therein, too, was he a son of this twentieth century.

But above all else is his claim to greatness founded on the triumph of the principle of Free Trade. Says Mr. Morley:

"The interest of that astonishing record of zeal, tact, devotion and courage lies principally for us in the circumstance that

the abolition of the protective duties on food, and the shattering of the protective system was, on the one side, the beginning of our great modern struggle against class preponderance at home, and, on another side, the dawn of higher ideals of civilization all over the world."

But to understand the significance of the change we must know something of the fireside history of England at the time.

In

"In Devonshire . . . the wages of the laborers were from seven to nine shillings a week, they seldom saw meat or tasted milk, and their chief food was a composite of ground barley and potatoes. Somersetshire the budget of a laborer, his wife, and five children under ten years of age was as follows: Half a bushel of wheat, cost four shillings; for grinding, baking and barm, sixpence ; firing, sixpence; rent, eighteenpence; leaving, out of the total earnings of seven shillings, a balance of sixpence, out of which to provide the family with clothing, potatoes and all other necessaries and luxuries of human existence."

Still worse was the condition of multitudes in the industrial centres.

"From 1815 to 1835 the power looms in Manchester had increased from two thousand to eighty thousand, and the population of Birmingham had grown from ninety to one hundred and fifty thousand. The same wonders had come to pass in enormous districts over the land."