VOL. 21-NO. 1047

action or to more radical revolution, either of which will utterly ruin us, or whether we are at last on the path toward recovery. Our people are for the time being mentally at sea. They wander hopelessly in the dark. It is the second tragic feature of what we call the German 'revolution'; that the madness of the conqueror does not leave us in peace to perfect our democracy at leisure, that the indifference and wrong-headedness of the world continue to push our people toward despair.

Simply observe the billboards in a German city to-day. If an unknown lecturer advertises a talk on some indifferent subject, let us say the relations of the sexes, the crowd throngs to hear him as if the whole weal and woe of the nation hung on this single point. He has to repeat his lecture a half dozen or a dozen times. People will pack Christian Science meetings to-day, and Spiritualist lectures tomorrow. And so it goes. To be sure, there are quieter and deeper currents moving among us. Numbers have

freed themselves from the materialistic obsessions of pre-war times, and are trying seriously to cultivate the higher values of life. But this does not help the government in the present emergency. The worthiest of our people are turning away from public service and political affairs, leaving them in the hands of reactionary or radical extremists. These extremists capitalize the despair of the masses, and misuse it for their selfish ends.

A Russian poet, Victor Panin, has written a novel upon present Russia, entitled The Hour of Trial. In this book, the first truly literary production which has reached us from the blockaded realm of the Bolsheviki, occur these sentences; sentences which Germany might well use to proclaim its own condition to the world:

WHILE reading the London Times one morning, I discovered a lawsuit and a letter. I am printing this letter because I have seldom seen a bit of writing in whose wording the author's nationality is more clearly stamped, and because it will offer food for thought to those who insist that English and American speech are identical. How many of our readers, we wonder, have read Mr. Rupert Hughes's eloquent and soundly reasoned plea for preserving a genuinely national flavor in American speech, or perused Mr. Henry Mencken's revealing book The American Language. Yet the question which these gentlemen have raised day by day becomes a genuine issue. And this issue, as I understand it, isshall we hold fast to the strictest British standard of speech or shall we admit American-born words and turns of speech into the book of good usage? Shall we be shadows or ourselves?

The writer confesses to a genuine sympathy with Mr. Hughes's attitude. He would have us hold fast to the traditional grammatic usage, yet eager and alert to give our vocabulary and our general speech any richness and color of American origin. It is time for a revolt against the apologetic, the colonial attitude, just as it is time for a certain class of Americans to cease pretending to be imitation Londoners.

But now for the letter. Observe how familiar the words, yet how British the feel of it. A certain Mr. D is writing to his landlord, Mrs. Gill, complaining that her agent and rent collector is not keeping certain

other tenants in order. The agent, aggrieved at the letter, sues the writer and is awarded damages.

DEAR MADAM: I trust that you will pardon me for sending direct the April rent for this flat. The present representative at Hornsey of your agents, Messrs. Stoate and Stanley, is not up to his work, and, if I may say so, it is a pity to pay commission when no services are rendered in return.

For a year and a half we have endured torture owing to the unnecessary tumult overhead. Mr. Sinclair tramps about the greater part of the morning in heavy boots doing housework. At night Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair go to the 'Pictures,' and a relation comes in tramping about and doing ironing and so forth, or Mr. Sinclair goes to one of his clubs, comes home late, and talks loudly into the small hours of the morning.

The children are provided with unsuitable toys for those who are not taken out a doll's pram and a large toy motor-car which are incessantly wheeled about over our heads. There is a constant succession of banging and shouting relations. Even when the Sinclairs go away their place is taken by Mrs. Sinclair's sister (a virago who delights in annoying people), her husband. and child. This woman's husband is in the printing trade, has to get up at six o'clock in the morning, and apparently thinks it necessary to wake us up as well. These creatures are in possession now.

At times Mr. Sinclair uses the premises as a warehouse, huge packing cases being dumped into the narrow hall here. A small select flat like this is not suitable for Mr. Sinclair and his kidney. What he needs is a Rowton House. The ceiling in our kitchen is coming down owing to the banging overhead, and a gas mantle only lasts an evening or two. They don't do their duty by the drains. All this has been repeatedly told to your agent's representative.

But, as indicated above, he is hopelessly incompetent. A warning from him to the Sinclairs stating that, in spite of the housing problem, people can still be ejected for habitually making their neighbors' lives unbearable would probably have resulted in a mitigation of the nuisance. But he won't do anything.

"They don't do their duty by the drains'- a telling sentence. An American letter would have been less humorous, but more vivid.

Grand Duke as Dramatist ERNST LUDWIG, ex-Grand Duke of Hesse, has emerged from his retirement in a new and noteworthy rôle. Under the pseudonym E. K. Ludhard he has published a Mystery in Dramatic Form, which has been accepted for performance at the German playhouse at Hamburg. The work is of a strongly religious character, and offers consolation to those bereaved by the war. Its central figure is Christ, who appears under the name of 'Mediator,' to bring comfort to a family who have lost son and brother in battle. His message is that 'for the eye of the soul' there is no death, and that faith can give absolute certainty of continuous community with the departed. In the climax of the piece a dead man appears to lift the black veil from his mother's shoulders, and she 'spreads out her arms as if relieved from a burden.'

For many years past the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig has been known as an eager encourager of art. His open-mindedness on this subject was not always very happy in its results, for under his encouragement there grew up in Darmstadt a residential quarter in which some of the houses looked as if they had been turned upside down.

A Christmas Book for the Blind OUT of a mass of books that come from the publishers at this season is one that attracts attention to itself by its form. The big page plates excite curiosity. Such an illustrated book has never been seen before. It is A Picture Book for the Blind. The title tells its main purpose, but its appeal goes out to the sighted as well. How can it fail

there? It is the only picture book of its kind in the world, designed for those whose fingers are their eyes. The National Institute for the Blind, 224-6-8, Great Portland Street, W. 1, is responsible for the enterprise.

A Cry from the Gallery

THE recent revival of Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle was so successful that voices from the

gallery were heard bawling, 'Author! Author!' Let us hope that Francis

Beaumont Gent. and his collaborator heard the call at their seats in the Inn of Paradise.

Another Language Question

One

A DISTINGUISHED London clergyman has two maids both named Kate. is a Cockney, the other a Scot. The difficulty of distinguishing the two is solved by the easy method of calling one Kite and the other Kate. No confusion ever arises.

The Robbery at Lake Como

THE Chronicle tells of the theft of the famous Byzantine silver cross and other ecclesiastical treasures kept at Gravedona on Lake Como, which the thieves broke into small pieces and sold for melting down:

Extraordinary psychological imbecility is revealed in the fact that although the cross alone is valued at 1,000,000 francs (over £40,000), the wretched perpetrators of this sacrilege turned over the entire collection to the silversmith for 510 francs (£21), and so realized £7 apiece for their pains.

It reads singularly like a parable of the dealings of the Bolsheviki with Russian civilization.

A New Book by Mr. Balfour

A NEW book by Mr. Balfour is a distinct event in the literary world and Essays, Speculative and Historical, which Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton have just published at 12s. 6d. net,

breaks a five years' silence. These silences are not uncommon with Mr. Balfour, for after his first book, A Defense of Philosophic Doubt, which made its appearance forty-one years ago, fourteen years intervened before he gave to the world Essays and Addresses in 1893, followed by Foundations of Belief in 1895. Another eight years passed and then came Economic Notes on Insular Trade, after which his publications became fairly regular until 1906, when there was another break of nine years.

The present volume is a collection of essays, lectures, and occasional papers written during the last twelve years, divided into two groups, 'Speculative' and 'Political.' The latter deal chiefly with Germany, and range in date from 1912 to 1918, including the British reply to President Wilson's request for a statement of the objects of the Entente Powers in the war.

Down with the Classics!

A LETTER from Sir Harry Johnston to the editor of the New Statesman:

SIR: Absence in the North of England, where the New Statesman is slow in penetrating, prevented my seeing 'Affable Hawk's' article, which contained an unusually vivid exposure of the nineteenth-century youth's waste of time over the classics. I therefore only read it to-day, concurrently with the protests it has aroused among the surviving champions of the classics.

To persons like myself, 'Affable Hawk's' article was a case of converting the converters or the long-converted. We could not help regarding it as a biologist or geologist of 1920 must have estimated the realization of evolution or the rejection of the incrusted Babylonian myths in religion by Canon Barnes - very creditable and heartening, but very belated.

But the protests are exasperating, for the protesters reproduce argu

ments as stale or as false as those used by the plumage traders in their defense of an iniquitous trade. They cannot see the disproportionate value to-day of 'classical' studies weighed against the thousand other studies which have come under our consideration since 1820. They do not realize that the tiny modicum of historical, ethnological, or ethical value in the Greek and Latin classics could be taught in about six out of the annual 1,680 hours a year devoted to education. A few specialists in comparative literature, in ancient history or prehistory, in numismatics, philology, the growth of religious ideas, and the origin of laws, arts, and sciences might go deeper into Greek and Latin prose and poetry. But the utility of such studies to most persons in the twentieth century is very small.

It is because the dons and schoolmasters have learned alas!· nothing else, that they still plead for the privilege of wasting young people's time and brains over these early efforts of Mediterranean man to philosophize on very little data, on these very dreary comedies with their Neolithic humor, these unreal tragedies, these concocted histories, this turgid poetry with its stale tropes and inapposite similes.

If there are beautiful thoughts, sudden perceptions of undying truths, original apothegms and genuine wit in Latin and Greek, are there not sentences equally pregnant of value in the Ila language of South Central Africa as translated by the Reverend Edwin Smith in his just issued book? The Smithsonian Institute has published during the last ten years a series of ethnological studies of North Amerindian languages in which appear translations of Red Indian songs, stories, and discourses that contain a philosophy as noteworthy in expression, in penetration, and glimpse of basic truth as anything to be found in the supposi

titious dialogues of Plato. Almost the only book in classical Latin which is of real enchaining, human interest is the Golden Ass of Apuleius. And that is mainly read for its obscenity.

The structure of classical Latin is so astonishingly perverse in its dislocation of the natural order of words in a sentence that were it not for the inscriptions left by unliterary soldiers one might almost imagine it a 'literary' tongue, devised so as not to be understood by the vulgar. It is thus impossible as a universal language. And when attempts were made in the Middle Ages by clerics and lay lawyers to write it in a reasonable manner the resultant tongue was styled 'Low Latin.' Nevertheless, some knowledge of its vocabulary-especially of Monkish Latin is useful for those who are seeking to acquire a sound knowledge of the modern romance tongues. And Romaic - Modern Greek - is one of the important languages of the Mediterranean and Near East. On those grounds, and on no others, these languages should be learned. As to the literature locked up in classical Latin and Greek, translations fortunately pullulate of all the more important authors. These translations were the only atonement made for their wasted lives by scores of masters of colleges, Bishops of the Church of England, headmasters of public schools, or Victorian statesmen. From such translations there can be rapidly conveyed to those curious as to the Mediterranean element in our culture a comprehensive and fairly accurate idea of the vapid, diffuse, confused, reiterated, ill-founded philosophies, sentiments,

ideals, records, and aspirations of the Greeks and Romans who lived between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 500.

But those last defenders of the classics whom we allow to linger on the stage should not anger and provoke the modernists by speaking of their favorite studies as 'the humanities,' or advance them as an antidote to materialism. The 'humanities' in education comprise everything that bears directly on the body and mind of the human species, and should commence with the inculcation of anthropology. An ignorance of anthropology lies at the back of all the maladministration of the British Empire, in Ireland as in East Africa, in Asia as in Tropical America; and it is the main cause of international discord. Yours, etc.,

H. H. JOHNSTON.

And a Story 'Pour en Finir'

He was from Scotland, and was making his first visit to London. Being a true-blooded Scot, he was very slow to acknowledge that London had anything in the way of buildings or parks to beat Edinburgh. But after seeing the Cenotaph he began to waver, though he still hesitated, seeking for a way out. The climax came with dramatic suddenness when his host took him along the embankment near Waterloo Bridge after nightfall. Across the river he caught sight of Dewar's bonnie Scotchman illuminated from head to toe, whose smile came beaming over the dark, gliding water. 'Mon,' he cried, that beats all. There's nathin' in Scotland like that. I'll give in.'