his utterance, and the light fresh American air, unthickened and undarkened by customs and established institutions. His reputation still takes its stand, not on his poems nor his books, but upon these 'Lectures.' He may be considered as the greatest exponent of what has since become such a prominent feature in French intellectual life as the conférence. Characteristically American, however, and un-French, he has no system. His lectures are a mosaic of separate sentences, each an infinitely repellent particle (he explained himself to Carlyle); patterns have been laboriously designed by commentators, but a good many of the stones seem to be missing. His thoughts thus are crystals; his reflections rather gnomic utterances than belles-lettres; and their author the teacher, the animatore of his countrymen, an insurgent idealist reacting against commerce in practice, Calvinism in theory, and hard precedent in art - a deliberate counterpoise in his idealism to the super-practicality of the 'Yankee.' We all have our moments when, like Dr. Relling in The Wild Duck, we are apt to regard 'ideals' as another name for 'falsehoods.' But with Americans the veneer of the counter is the thinnest of disguises, and Emerson, above all, has contributed to make them a nation of idealists.

The growth of a country in the politest arts cannot be termed slow when that country, like America, within fifty years from the close of its colonial period, produces a man of letters such as Emerson. Old England and New England, Britain and America, are agreed on the essential point that he is the most universal figure, excluding men of action and statesmen such as Washington and Lincoln, that the new world has produced. There is nothing of the imi

tator of Addison, or Goldsmith, or Scott about Emerson, he is far less reflective than Hawthorne or Poe; if he reflects at all it is a suprême of the great penseurs of France; or if he enters the field that Hamerton and Bryce and Taine and Wallace have rendered illustrious, he outshines them all. At the time of his death in 1882, one year after George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle, Emerson was recognized as the foremost writer and thinker of his country, but this recognition had come gradually. The candor and the vigor of his thought had led him often to champion unpopular causes, and during his earlier years of authorship his departures from Unitarian orthodoxy were viewed with hostility and alarm. In the Abolitionist movement also he took a part which brought him the distinction of being mobbed in Boston and Cambridge. His finest essay writing, which covers a huge range, corresponds pretty closely to our early Victorian period and extends from his noble adumbration of The American Scholar in 1837 to the harmonious essay on Beauty of 1860. Progress or decline is less notable in the traits of his work over this period than in that of almost any philosopher or stylist. To embody a synthetic philosophy or to practise the thrifty art of self-consistency seem to have been concepts equally alien to the Emersonian mentality. From some points of view his work, like Ruskin's, is a vast heap of contradictory propositions, the reconciliation of which has been attempted by admiring interpreters, but rescued from futility certainly by none. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the very diversity of his opinions, his speculation and his starcraft between them have won him a greater diversity of devotees than any modern thinker, and that among all

sorts and most unlikely conditions of men and women. Among hard-bitten types of folk to whom abstract reasonng of any kind would have generally been regarded as abhorrent, the rite of the Sortes Emersoniana has been known to have been practised not infrequently with grateful acceptance. The solace derived by people of fluctuating ages and antecedents from the disseminators of Pensées has perhaps attained a higher level among the habitués of Montaigne and Pascal. Locke, Burke, and Rousseau produced their effect upon the passions and preoccupations of mankind in a different manner; but among modern utterers of detached thoughts and discoveries of more or less paradoxical flash-lights of opinion Emerson stands solitary and unique.

There is something of serenity and assurance about the countenance of the American thinker that would to most men be a secure passport to the position of master-confessor. There is something about his writings, undoubtedly, of a peculiarly medicinal character for many kinds of obscure and indefinable maladies of the brain, the heart, the temper, the imagination. His work is certainly in some particulars diffuse and repetitive; but thanks, on the other hand, to the singular beauty and condensation of his style, which deals not seldom with things of the mind with a starkness and precision comparable to that with which Defoe treats of the world of matter, it is not difficult to confine within the limits of a moderate volume a pretty complete view both of Emersonian philosophy (compensation, self-reliance, friendship, heroism, gifts, character), ethic (Representative Men), and Emersonian observation (English Traits). His own gifts of compensation and calmness were carried to a pitch in Emerson which

makes of him an incomparable observer. What could surpass his own summary of old Coleridge's cathedral preachment at him at Highgate on August 15, 1833?

I was in his company for about an hour, but find it impossible to recall the largest part of his discourse, which was often like so many printed paragraphs in his books perhaps the same so readily did he fall into certain commonplaces. As I might have foreseen, the visit was rather a spectacle than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity. He was old and preoccupied, and could not bend to a new companion and think with him. Here again, in his account of English manners, is a characteristic Emersonian curve:

men.

A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish of the The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex. After the spire and the spines are formed, or with the formation, a juice exudes, and a hard enamel varnishes every part. The keeping of the proprieties is as indispensable as clean linen. No merit quite countervails the want of this, while this sometimes stands in lieu of all. "T is in bad taste' is the most formidable word an Englishman can pronounce. But this japan costs them dear. There is a prose in certain Englishmen which exceeds in wooden deadness all rivalry with other countrymen. There is a knell in the conceit and externality of their voice which seems to say, 'Leave all hope behind.' In this Gibraltar of propriety mediocrity gets intrenched and consolidated and founded in adamant. An Englishman of fashion is like one of those souvenirs, bound in gold vellum, enriched with delicate engravings, on thick hotpressed paper, fit for the hands of ladies and princes, but with nothing in it worth reading or remembering.

Are we not still fighting for 'it's never done' against verboten? He tells us what is still to most of us, as in Dr. Johnson's day, the unflattering truth about the sea, with an abject realism that has found few imitators.

I find the sea life an acquired taste, like that for tomatoes and olives. The confine

ment, cold, motion, noise, and odor are not to be dispensed with. . . . Nobody likes to be treated ignominiously, upset, shoved against the side of the house, rolled over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis, and stewing oil. We get used to these annoyances at last, but the dread of the sea remains longer. The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what eggshells are drifting all over it, each one like ours with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth.

The chapter on the author's introduction to The Times office through a pretty garden yard in Printing House Square, 'We walked with some circumspection as if we were entering a powder-mill,' starts a cascade of epigrams incomparably diverting at the present hour. Like Carlyle, who worried over his inability to see the hand of the devil in human life, Emerson gave utterance to the living word. The contrast between the two voices (as between Hardy's and Meredith's) is indeed abysmal. Carlyle, a voice crying in the wilderness of a complex and over-loaded civilization;

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Emerson with his cheery aspiration, his appeal to the individual to hitch his wagon to a star, a voice not only ennobling, but practically effective. The phantom of ulterior aim which peers out from his prophetic uttermay at times impair their literary value. But But the profit is always a pure, national, and patriotic one far removed from the mainchance practicality of 'Poor Richard.' We do not go to Emerson primarily, however, either for literature or philosophy, but for that heavenly spark which penetrates morality with emotion and renders moral ideas elevating and stimulating to man. He helps us to realize, as no other modern does, the importance of the everyday man, the ubiquity of romance, the balance of nature, the mystery of life, the omnipresence and proximity of God in the meanest act. We realize on all sides the immanence of his ideas, and we acquiesce in Lowell's fine application to him of Jonson's eulogy of Bacon.

Two months ago it was announced in the newspapers of the United States that there were then more American soldiers actually in the trenches in France than there were men in the original British Expeditionary Force. The United States Secretary of War now states for publication that America has in France an army of more than 50,000 men. There have already been over 6,000 American casualties. American soldiers are now arriving in France in increasing numbers, and two million will have been sent over by the end of this year if the present rate of transport is maintained. Owing to the skill, daring, and thoroughness with which the transports are convoyed, to which must naturally be added an element of good fortune, no outward-bound troopship has yet been torpedoed.

The increasing shipments of men are due to the larger number of ships available for the purpose. Since the U. S. Government Board of Control has taken over the shipbuilding operations, which was not until America had been in the war several months, over one million tons of new shipping have been floated, and ships are now being launched at the rate of two every twenty-four hours. Practically all except one of the German ships that were seized in American harbors in April, 1917, are now in the troop service, notwithstanding the efforts made by the Germans so to disable them as to make them useless. Among other interesting documents acquired by the American government was a

list of these interned ships, with a description of the damage done to each one of them by German engineers and the estimated time it would take to make repairs. In every case has the damage been made good in less time than the Germans thought possible; and in some instances where the memorandum stated that the missing parts were 'irreplaceable' they were promptly supplied, and these vessels are now carrying soldiers to France.

Another reason why American soldiers are now coming in greater numbers than earlier in the year is the decision of the Allied governments to the effect that men are now of greater importance than supplies. From the first the American government has been guided in all oversea operations by the wishes and advice of the Allies; and when it was asked whether the Allies wanted a ton of men or a ton of material, the latter was given precedence by the Allied spokesmen. As the German drive developed its real strength, however, men became of more importance than material, a plentiful supply of which had accumulated in England, France, and Italy, or even of food for the civilian populations; hence rationing and a rapidly growing American army in France. The American flag is no longer in the firing line merely as a matter of sentiment and guarded by a few devoted souls; it is there as the emblem of an army which in the days before this war would have been considered of imposing size. Even in this great war, with its millions of fighting men, it

is bearing such share of the actual fighting as to be of real assistance to the extended line of the Allied forces. In other words, in less than ten months from the mobilization of the 'new army,' America has become a factor for serious consideration by the enemy in the military operations in France. The more than half-million American soldiers now in France are but the vanguard of the hundreds of thousands following and the millions who will come if needed. There are twelve million men of military age in the United States that is, between twenty-one and thirty-one. This vast reservoir will be drawn upon to the full needs of the situation as it may develop, for there is but one thought and purpose in America to-day, and that is the defeat of the military power of Germany.

During the past few weeks Congress has been at work in Washington investigating many features of the conduct of the war, and as the results of these investigations have been given to the public each day, a confusing picture has been thrown upon the screen. Much discouraging testimony has been given, and if actual results were ignored, the pessimistically inclined might well feel hopeless. As it is the results that count, however, it is less confusing and more cheering to consider them and leave to distracted government officials the task of correcting blunders of organization and administration. Also, it may be added, to those who are concerned may be left the task of separating politically inspired opposition and obstruction from honest and well-founded criticism. The great game of politics is being played in all countries, even in the stress of war, and nowhere is it played with greater vigor, more adroitness, or more audacity than in Washington. It is not only the 'outs'

who are looking for weak spots in the armor of the 'ins,' for the latter cannot rely entirely upon defensive warfare. There is to be a Congressional election next November, and the conduct of the war is the only issue available. Both parties are avowedly in favor of intensive warfare, so the issue is again narrowed to details of organization and administration. The opposition is making all it can out of the mistakes and misfortunes of President Wilson and his fellow Democrats, and party lines have been closely drawn in all matters which do not give aid and comfort to the enemy.

On all great questions of policy and in all matters that concern American progress on the field of battle and of aid to the Allies, Congress has acted upon non-partisan lines, and the nation has subordinated all political antagonisms to the work in hand. With hardly a protest President Wilson has been given greater power than has been possessed by any preceding President, and those familiar with the jealous care with which the Senate and the House have in the past guarded against any encroachment by the executive upon the legislative powers and privileges have lived to witness a revolutionary change in the machinery of the American government. It would have been an evil day for America had there been no criticism, no checking up of administrative work and no fear of political condemnation on the part of the nation. On the whole it. has been wholesome and useful criticism, much of it constructive, and from the compromises that follow all controversies have come practical and effective laws and regulations, to which is due the rapid progress made by America in the past six months.

From the confused background of political controversy, personal criticism, and Congressional wrangle pro