peace among nations. "The way is to advance toward the emancipation of mankind and the principle of the common living together of mankind. If that aim is attained, the restriction of armaments will come naturally of its own accord.”

JAPANESE newspapers are discussing the recent decrease in the number of Chinese students in Japan. Yomiuri attributes it partly to financial reasons, and observes that so long as America and other countries offer superior advantages to students from China, the Japanese authorities cannot afford to remain idle. It is suggested that the government grant 600 Yen a year to each of 500 Chinese students in the higher schools of the empire. The Chinese prefer to go to Western countries and especially the United States, because they regard the educational standards there as higher and other facilities, such as laboratories, as better. Tokyo Asahi says that before the late war, the number of Chinese students in Japan was estimated at 20,000, and that it has since decreased to 4,000, although the number going to America, France, and England has constantly grown. It attributes the decrease to three reasons: the difficulty which graduates from Japanese institutions experience in obtaining positions when they return to China, the high cost of studying in Japan, and the inferior educational attainments of some students educated in the empire as compared with those educated in America and Europe. It is particularly interesting to note that these Japanese critics recognize that many Chinese students live under more wholesome surroundings and are influenced by higher spiritual and moral standards in American schools than in those of Japan.

SIR DENNISON Ross, director of the London School of Oriental Studies, in in an exhortation to his British countrymen to learn Japanese, says that this is one of the easiest languages of the world to pronounce. "Most of the words end in vowels and none of the consonants offers any difficulties." The structure of Japanese is very peculiar and very strange to the beginner. It is hard to realize a grammar which recognizes no persons and no genders-but such is the case with Japanese. The language also has no relative pronouns. However, there is no reason why people, whose mother tongue is English, should fight shy of the language. For practical every-day purposes, six months study of the spoken tongue will 'carry an intelligent man a long way' providing he has competent teachers.

THE GEORGIA INCIDENT.

ONE OF those incidents which put America to shame, and evoke a patronizing moral comment from foreign critics, draws the following tolerant comment from the London Morning Post.

"THE coloured man trouble on the Williams plantation in Georgia recalls irresistibly to any student of Mr. Dooley the words of that extremely wise man, spoken more than twenty years ago to Mr. Hennessy. The latter had asked the philosopher: "What's goin' to happen to the naygur?" Mr. Dooley replied: "Well, he'll ayther have to go to the north an' be a subjick race, or stay in the south an' be an objick lesson. 'Tis a hard time he'll have, annyhow. If I was a black man I'd choose th' cotton belt in prifrince to the belt on the neck from the polisman's club. I would so." There are people to-day

who say that the writer of Uncle Tom's Cabin left a terrible legacy of misery to posterity. In Russia there has never been a day's happiness for the serfs since the serfs were freed. In England-but, there, one can talk too much.'

FRENCH LABOR AND RESTORATION

AN interesting phase of the problem of restoring the devastated territories in France, and incidentally of the larger question of reparation in general, has just been brought into prominence by a conference of representatives from the devastated regions organized by the French General Confederation of Labor to formulate a plan of reconstruction to be put into operation immediately. The Germans have urged from the first that they should be allowed to restore these territories with German materials and labor. The French government, including the Chamber of Deputies, has refused to listen to such a plan. Of course the Germans have charged that the French government has been influenced by big contracting interests, which expect to make huge profits out of reconstruction work. Now the French Confederation of Labor is reported to have demanded precisely what Germany has offered, namely, that the Germans be allowed to send workmen and materials into the devastated regions and rebuild what their soldiers destroyed.

RUSSIAN REFUGEES.

THE French government, which has spent more than two hundred million francs in maintaining Russian refugees from Crimea, who were with General Wrangel's army, has been obliged by its own financial distress

to withdraw this assistance. Thousands of these Russians have been sent to other countries; some twenty thousand to Serbia, ten thousand to Brazil, and one thousand to Peru. It is estimated that there are a million Russian exiles and refugees in Europe, who are now partly dependent on charity, or upon their precarious earnings in unaccustomed occupations and a strange land.

L'Opinion says that of the 270,000 Russians who left Sevastopol after Wrangel's defeat, 6,000 were taken aboard former Russian naval vessels and are at present in Tunis, where they are camping in the neighborhood of Bizerte. Their general condition and state of health are said to be satisfactory.

BANDITRY AS A BUSINESS

The Japan Advertiser summarizes an article by an anonymous writer, who describes himself as "a retired Manchurian bandit," which was recently published in Taiyo. He classifies these professional looters into five groups: those led by former government officials who have lost office; those led by "ordinary people;" those led by men of military experience who are supported by Chinese army officers; those led by. men with a political purpose, generally financed at present by the Bolsheviki; and those who 'take to the woods' as a protest against misgovernment. These bandits are organized according to the present system of the Chinese army, into sections of 100 men or more, and battalions of several times that number. Each section is composed of three companies and each company of three squads, with a full complement of officers. They use Russian, Japanese and Chinese rifles,

and have a few machine guns and mountain guns. This equipment is the private property of the leaders. Discipline is far stricter than in the regular Chinese army. The organizations are recruited in April or May and disband in October or November. During the season when inclement weather makes banditry disagreeable, the members labor as ordinary coolies. Their harvest season is during the summer, when they establish themselves in "dens", and send out scouting parties to look up likely booty and opportunities for raiding. After the expense of the expeditions has been deducted each season, "the profits" are distributed in prearranged shares among the members. A good leader expects to make about $5,000, an ordinary follower $150 to $200 out of a season's campaign. These robber bands generally work in secret agreement with Chinese officials.

A KIND WORD FOR WILSON

La Dépéche de Toulouse, a liberal democratic daily, prints one of the most sympathetic references to President Wilson which has appeared in the French press apropos of his retirement from the White House:

'President Wilson leaves the White House, a martyred invalid, deserted and forgotten. Like all those who in the past have served justice, he has been rewarded with ingratitude and abuse. Our Nationalists, with their ordinary blindness, join in this concert. The Americans forget that they derided Lincoln, the rail splitter, before exalting him to the side of Washington as their second national hero. President Wilson has not only been the voice of his age, but the voice of human conscience. At the most critical moment of the War, he re

vived our courage and re-awakened our hope. He can afford to wait. His words have been recorded. History will restore to his proper rank the statesman who was the first 'to voice the thoughts of the great masses condemned to eternal silence.... President Wilson merely saw farther than does his successor. By associating the Great Powers in a League of Nations, he attempted to place a barrier in the way of Japanese imperialism, and to preserve the integrity of China without a resort to arms. In a very practical way, he planned to save his Country and the World the enormous cost of a great war for the mastery of the Pacific. He will not be comprehended or done justice until the tempests which he sought to conjure finally wreak their wrath upon the World.'

LET THE AMERICAN STAY

COMMENTING upon the rumor that the American forces are to be withdrawn from the Rhine, the Berliner Tageblatt observes that while this would be a financial relief to Germany, on account of the particularly heavy expense of maintaining our troops, it would be a misfortune in other respects. The Americans are represented as more level-headed than their colleagues, though they share that quality to some extent with the English. They have constituted a conciliatory element among the occupying forces. Even the conservative Kölnische Zeitung, which was intensely hostile to the United States during the war, remarks: "Oppressive as is the occupation for the Rhine country, and desirable as is the immediate lessening of the cost of that occupation, it is to be hoped in the interest of the people along the

Rhine, as well as of the government of Germany, that the American forces may remain here somewhat longer."

BROCKDORFF-RANTZAU PROTESTS

COUNT BROCKDORFF-RANTZAU, who was German ambassaeor at Copenhagen during the war, and who as Foreign Minister of the German Republic headed its delegation to the Paris Conference, has addressed an open letter to General Ludendorff, protesting against the implication in the article which we published last week, that during his service at Copenhagen he agitated in favor of a revolution. Brockdorff-Rantzau's liberal views and alleged pacifist sympathies exposed him to attack by the pan-Germans during the war; and

at that time Ludendorff wrote him assuring him of his confidence. Now Ludendorff refuses to modify the wording of his article. The incident is merely a minor episode in the conflict between the "bitter-enders" and the advocates of an early peace, which started in Germany the first year of the war, and still continues as an acrimonious historical debate.

MINOR NOTES

C. K. CHESTERTON'S New Witness asserts that the British press is publishing fictitious news of the receptions

accorded the Prince of Wales in his tours of the country. Speaking of his recent visit to Glasgow, this journal says: "We observe with deep regret that there were marked expressions of hostility to his person from thousands of people....Why did the press not put in bold headlines that the procession of unemployed was held back by mounted police and soldiers with fixed bayonets, that

the Prince had to escape by a side entrance from St. Andrews Hall in order to avoid the crowd, and that at least once a missile was publicly thrown at him in the streets?"

GREAT BRITAIN is congratulating itself upon the steady improvement in its foreign exchange. The pound sterling has risen, on an average, over 22% in other money markets within the past few months. It has recognized, however, that since the war, the indebtedness of Europe to the United States has reached a point where there is always a greater volume of European currency at the command of New York than of any other financial center in the world.

This has resulted in New York unloading its excess on the London mar

ket.

MR. LANSING's Saturday Evening Post articles upon the leading figures at the Peace Conference have been syndicated in the London Times and the Echo de Paris, and are naturally the sensation of the day in European press.

THE Berlin Trade Union Federation has made arrangements to sell practically at cost to the organized workers of Berlin such articles as clothing, furnishing goods, and shoes, and has established nine distributing points in the city for this purpose.

MERMEIX, whose articles upon the Armistice were recently printed in The Living Age, has published a book entitled: Les Négociations secretes et les quatre armistices, which is said by French reviewers to be well documented and to contain important new material.

1.

"That's the way things are running -gives you a shiver to think of them."

"You stop glaring at that fire. Go to bed."

"Ye-es, so they run. Russia is going to the dogs, that's sure, all right."

Three soldiers were sitting near the clay wall of a barn with a high thatch roof. A fire was blazing before them. One of them had hung out his foot-rags on small sticks to dry by the fire, and was now looking after them to keep them from being caught in the flames. Another was putting a patch on his breeches. The third was sitting on the ground, his feet crossed under him, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his coat; freckled and large-nosed, with a thin, black beard, he was gazing at the fire out of his deep-sunk, maddened eyes.

"Everything is sold, that's the way things run," he was saying in a dull, low voice. "The moment our side begins to get the better of them, an order comes to retreat. All we do is string Jews on tree limbs, and the treason has its nest way up in the tree top."

"I am so sick and tired of this war! They can't describe that in any newspaper," said the soldier who was drying his rags, as he carefully dropped some faggots on the fire. "When we

started advancing, suddenly we found ourselves retreating. And now they want us to advance again, the Devil take them! And still we find ourselves in the same place. No results out of that," he pronounced the last words with evident relish. "All our work seems to be here. There's hardly a woman in the neighborhood that goes without a child. Makes me sick to look at them."

"The other day Lieutenant Zhadov came over to where I was," said the soldier who was busy sewing, and smiled sneeringly without looking up from his work. "Well, he must be sick of nothing to do, and the Devil wouldn't let him rest. So he started account of this didn't like the I didn't say a

going after me, all on hole. And then he way I stood there. word. And it all ended very simply, he just hit me in the face and walked off again."

The soldier who was drying his rags took up the conversation:

"Not a rifle in sight, nothing to shoot with. And over at our battery there are seven shells to a gun. So naturally, the only thing that remains for them is to hit the privates in the face."

The fellow who was sewing raised his head and looked at him as if startled by his boldness. The blackbearded soldier said in the same tone of voice, as before:

"They've gotten the whole people over now; recruiting up to forty-three