"There must be a good many people in Berlin who are not poor," said Delia. "They offer me a shilling an hour for English lessons."

"But you are living with friends?" "I have been. I shall be alone in future. My aunt is going on a concert tour round the world. She will be away two years."

"Have you relations in England?" "Yes. I have cousins in London. I could go to them till I got work, but it is impossible to save the journey money out of lessons at a shilling an hour. . . and to feed and clothe and lodge myself. . . .”

"What does your aunt say?"

"She says Tra lira la. She doesn't trouble about me or any one else. She say's I'm a fool not to go on the stage." "But can you act?"

"A little . . . and I can dance; but I don't want to do it. I want to go back to England. I wish I had never come to Berlin."

Delia noticed that the girl had eaten her one sandwich ravenously but did not fetch herself anything more.

"Will you keep my seat for me?" she said, and going to the buffet again she chose a heaped-up plate of sandwiches and cakes and took them back with her. "What must it feel like to be hungry and have no money for food? she said to herself, and she knew that this must have been Lydia's case. The girl gladly ate more at Delia's invitation.

"Have you enjoyed your year in Berlin?" asked Miss Jordan.

"Yes," said Delia. "But I shall be glad to get home."

"You live in the north?"
"How did you know?"

"Frau von Quint told me before you arrived. Do you live in a town?"

"No; quite in the country-near lakes and hills."

"Ah!" said Lydia with a long look and breath of longing.

Delia took a section of a grape tart and began to eat it. An idea was crystallizing in her mind but was not quite ready for expression yet. Like Mr. F.'s aunt she hated a fool and was always as careful as she could be not to play the fool herself. Philanthropy was not much in her way either. Too often, she held, did folly and sentiment wear a philanthropic guise. But this idea, though it conferred a kindness, had a commendable business side. It would save her uncle money. Neither he nor her conscience could say that she had been run away with by impulse. It would save him a sound sum of money.

"Do you really want to get back to England?" she said.

"I would work my way back as stewardness on a steamer if I could get one to take me," said the girl. "I was going to ask some charitable society to help me back, but whether any one will-if you are not an outcast or a criminal it is the most difficult thing in the world to get help."

"If you like I will take you back next week," said Delia.

The girl loked up from her plate as if she could not believe her ears.

"It is to suit myself," explained Delia; "you need not feel under any obligation to me. My uncle does not wish me to travel alone, and threatens to send me an old nurse who would be more trouble than help. If you will come with me I'll wire to stop her. I am sure we could manage by ourselves."

"But I have no money-none at all," said the girl, blushing uncomfortably red.

"You would not need any for the journey. I should pay all your expenses till you reached your cousins. You are sure they would take you in?"

There was no doubt of that, Lydia said, and in a few minutes the matter was settled. She could be ready when

...

"They won't do that . . . why should they?"

"They turned me out of the house." "I never knew why."

"It was because 'dear August' made me an offer of marriage."

"Really! But suppose you had accepted the offer?"

"They made him retract . . . in my presence. He did not behave like a hero."

"I'm not much surprised to hear that," said Delia, who had long since decided that dear August was a worm.

On the 16th of December last I had the good fortune to be present, a spectator in the Strangers' Gallery, at a session of the Chamber of Deputies in Constantinople, when Saïd Pasha's policy on a constitutional question concerning the dissolution of the Chamber by the Sultan, was subjected to a violent attack by the Opposition. The proceedings afforded an unusually instructive object-lesson in the political and social economics of a nation in process of adapting itself to a new and complex environment. Here was the young and heady wine of European democracy visibly agitating an ancient but serviceable skin of Asia; here were the blood-brethren and beneficiaries of the Revolution already divided amongst themselves, afflicted by the eternal questions that separate the Ins from the Outs, the True Believer from the Infidel. Here was the new administrative machine settling down into the old inevitable grooves-a "Committee of Union and Liberty," fiercely assailing a "Committee of Union and Progress." Here was the impatient new, fiercely striving to ring out the philosophic old-a silent struggle of systems, grim conflict of human and

racial forces of East and West, all set forth and conducted upon lines of parliamentary procedure. The Chamber, in its severely practical architecture and equipment, was suggestive of a lecture hall or an anatomical school, and the beardless young men who occupied the tiers of seats and desks on the Left, might have lent color to this suggestion, but that their behavior was far removed from that of men who come to listen or to learn. Observing their fierce minatory gestures, listening to their passionate outcries of derision and protest; noting the nervous, almost hysterical, emotions evoked by their leader's fine frenzy of denunciation at the Tribune, one's thoughts reverted instinctively to the main source of all this eloquence and political upheaval, to the Mountain of the Jacobins and to the Encyclopædists who sowed such fertile seeds of change and unrest; to the intellectual giants, the fierce malcontents, the hungry sansculottes and visionary demagogues of the French Revolution, whose words and works are bearing such strange fruits to-day unto the uttermost parts of the earth. Over against these Jacobins of modern Turkey sat, calm

and dignified, the deputies of the Centre and Right, impressive in themselves, because of the gravity and decorum of their bearing. Many of them wore the conventional frock coats of Western Europe, but the dull glow of red fezes above the black served as an insistent reminder of Islam, whilst, scattered through the house, were other outward and visible signs of the complexity of the Moslem Empire. Here were the green and white turbans of ulemahs, mollahs, and hodjas; the beards and baggy trousers of a score of softas; the gorgeous robes and goldbraided turbans of deputies from Arabia and Syria, and a sprinkling of military uniforms; picturesque and significant features of a gathering that, beneath all its conventions of modernity, conceals the swift currents and deep-rooted passions of antagonistic races and creeds-Jews, Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, Bedouins, and Kurds, all brought here together by permission of the dominant Turk, to work out so much of their destinies as may be solved by panaceas of constitutional procedure.

It was an unusually stormy séance, the Opposition and the Independents (elated by recent electioneering successes and by defections from the other side) forcing their attack upon the Grand Vizier with fierce personal invective, bitter irony, and thinly veiled threats. Speeches by deputies of the Centre and Right were punctuated by hostile interruptions and derisive laughter-forefingers of scorn were pointed to and from all parts of the house; half a dozen heated arguments were often proceeding simultaneously between individual members, either shouting from their seats or gesticulating in the gangways. The simulated fervor of politicians showed many signs of giving place to genuine passions of conflict, and this most noticeably where the cosmopolitan freethink

ers of Paris-bred Young Turkey attacked the high places of Moslem orthodoxy. Above the tumult and the shouting clanged the noisy futility of the President's bell; while beneath the Tribune, grimly impassive, sat the Dictator of the Revolution, "second conqueror of Constantinople,"-Mahmud Shevket Pasha, Minister of Warmeditating, no doubt, on the strange uses of constitutional government. It was a scene that threw no little light upon the working of the Turks parliamentary machine; at the same time, it explained Hajji Baba's impression of our House of Commons-"a house of madmen who meet half the year round for the purpose of quarrelling."

As the aged Saïd Pasha made his slow and painful way to the Tribune and commenced reading, in a weary monotone, his platitudinous defence of the proposed modification of the Constitution, the uproar ceased for a little while, hushed partly by the Turk's instinctive reverence for old age, and partly because the Grand Vizier's voice was scarcely audible beyond the front benches. But not for long; the old man, fumbling amongst his papers, began to read for the second time some dreary notes on the Belgian Constitution, and the howls and jeers broke out afresh. As I watched the pitiful figure of the man who had been Abdul Hamid's âme damnée, as I thought on the changes which he had seen and suffered since the passing of the autocrat of Yildiz Kiosk, there came to my mind the remembrance of another Eastern premier fallen upon evil days, Prince Ch'ing, Grand Chamberlain, opportunist in chief and head squeezer of the Chinese Empire, and I saw him again as he was, a sorrowful and shifty figure, together with his henchman the Chief Eunuch Li Lien-ying, at the funeral of the Empress Dowager three years ago. The memories thus evoked came as a fitting culmination

The

to emphasize many points of resemblance between the state of Young Turkey and that of Young China, things of which one is first subconsciously aware when the railway carries one through that cutting in the Theodosian Wall which has its exact counterpart in the approaches to the Ch'ien-mên terminus at Peking. mournful cabbage gardens that find shelter in the No-Man's Land beneath the ancient mouldering battlements; the treeless hills enclosing dusty plains and endless vistas of desolation; the hand-to-mouth existence of hereditary bondsmen; the pullulating slums, the human scarcecrows whining for baksheesh; strange sounds and stranger smells, that suggest the unfathomable mysteries of Eastern life. All these features of Constantinople, as a permanent and immutable background for the latest manifestations of Europe's dominant but ever-alien civilization, may be seen and heard by travellers to-day in Peking and the provincial capitals of China.

My thoughts had wandered, far from Saïd Pasha and his apathetic exposition of constitutional government, back to the days when Abdul Hamid and Tzu Hsi, all unconscious of impending doom, governed their respective Empires, when suddenly there sat down beside me a Chinese gentleman, middle-aged, soberly dressed in gray silks, tall, dignified, and entirely at his ease. He came with the inevitable and irrelevant suddenness of a dream; and it seemed quite fitting that, upon his being seated, several green-turbaned Moslem clerics turned their attention from Saïd Pasha, and came to salute him with the curiously impressive greetings that pass between the Faithful. Engaging him in conversation, I found him to be a native of Peking and a doctor by profession. He had just made the pilgrimage to Mecca, having come from China by sea, and was re

turning via London and the Siberian Railway. As a good Mahomedan, he had done his poor best to grow a beard, an effort which detracted something from an otherwise prepossessing appearance. He spoke Arabic fluently, but no European tongue, and plunged straightway into expression of his deep concern at the progress of the Revolution in China and the dangers threatening life and property at Peking. After satisfying his sundry and manifold inquiries concerning the price of commodities in Europe, the cost of travel by the Siberian route, and the dangers of life in London, I succeeded in directing his attention to the scene before us. His opinion of constitutional government, as a solution of the troubles and adversities of Asiatic peoples, was frankly sceptical. A good Moslem, no doubt, and possibly a good doctor, he was evidently no expert politician, but his attitude and views were peculiarly interesting and instructive, if only because there are seven million Mahomedans in China, and their sentiments towards the Government can never be a negligible quantity. He looked down upon the turbulent deputies of the Opposition with the calm detachment of a philosopher, tolerantly contemplating, through this veil of illusion, these "unaccountable, uncomfortable works of God." But at a moment when half a dozen of the malcontents were dancing, gesticulating, and shouting as one man, loudly advising the Grand Vizier to go home and resign, he turned to me and said, "I hear that the Chinese are also to have a Parliament. You English have had one for many years. Is your Parliament just like this?" I think that, to his mind as to mine, there occurred a prophetic vision of Young China, all in frock coats and top hats. howling itself hoarse in denunciation of Prince Ch'ing and the elder statesmen of the Middle Kingdom, for the

greater glory and felicity of the Chinese people-but the British vision was clearly beyond his powers of imagination. I told him that, though the British Constitution was still peculiarly our own, the methods and manners of demagogues, applied to the art of government are much the same all the world over. This seemed to afford him some satisfaction; nevertheless, he continued to express concern as to the Republican movement in China, and admiration for the Turks who, in spite of their revolutionary triumphs, had been wise enough to hold fast to their ancient customs and beliefs in maintaining the monarchical principle. He ridiculed the idea that China could be well and orderly governed by the hotheads and amateur politicians of the Cantonese party, and spoke bitterly of the excesses and abuses which must follow from their sudden rise to power. "They will eat up the country like locusts," he said, "their destruction will be worse than that of the Boxers." At the back of his mind, no doubt, there lurked an uncomfortable sentiment of Peking at the mercy of the rabble, visions of the looting mob descending on his defenceless home in Gold Fish Street. These things meant more to him than any theoretical virtues in constitutional government, for which, indeed, he professed no sort of respect.

pre

In considering the present condition of affairs in China, it is natural enough to compare the rapid success of the Revolutionary movement with the triumph of the Young Turks in 1908; for, at first sight, there are many points of resemblance between Young China and Young Turkey. But the resemblant features are essentially on the surface, and there is, I think, a general tendency to exaggerate the permanence and constructive value of the forces (evoked in both cases by Western learning and economic pressure) LIVING AGE. VOL. LVI. 2955

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and to assume that they are destined rapidly to change national and structural characteristics. In the recent history of the Chinese Empire and of the Revolution-which is no revolution of the Chinese people, but merely the accidental triumph of a body of politicians -there are many episodes and phases for which exact parallels may be found in the recent history of Turkey. Indeed, it is impossible to study the evolution and results of constitutional government in the Ottoman Empire, to examine into the fundamental origins of the nation's chronic troubles of disorder and unrest, without perceiving something identical, in causes and effects, not only in China, but in India, Persia, and other parts of Asia. The record of the corrupt Hamidian régime, for instance, greatly resembles that of the Court of the Manchus; the words and works of the Cantonese progressives have much in common with those of the Salonika Committee; the inefficiency and corruption of the officials in both countries have greatly contributed to the general rottenness of the State, and the insidious influences of cosmopolitan finance have increased it, steadily aiding and abetting "peaceful penetration" by the Powers that claim the reversion of every Sick Man's heritage. In both countries, much of the first enthusiasm of the common cause of nationalism has evaporated, exposing predominant motives of personal ambition; in both there are unmistakable symptoms of unreasoning Chauvinism, combined with shortsighted neglect of national and Imperial interests. In both countries (but especially in China) the sincere and unselfish minority has been speedily swamped by place-seeking students and unruly soldiers; the voice of the patriot has been drowned in the clamor of the politician, and the cohesion temporarily inspired by a common cause against the Throne has been fol