have an abundant crop of grievances. To-day it is because their letter-boxes are mysteriously spirited away by unknown parties. Another day all foreign correspondence is opened and censored by a Black Cabinet. Rarely, I am told, does a newspaper containing an article favorable to Poland reach a Danzig subscriber.

After all, it is a tempest in a teapot, for Danzig, with its 190,000 inhabitants, is no Berlin. The offices of these wrangling contestants are so close together that the respective champions pass each other on the streets a dozen times a day. Moreover, they are all cultivated, correct gentlemen, whom in private life you cannot help liking: President Sahm, the terrible Prussian giant; Herr Ferber, his foreign-affairs specialist a very learned man; the Polish General Commissioner, who happens to bear the Teutonic name of Strassburger and is a gentleman of the delicate, insinuating, cardinalesque type; Admiral Berovsky, an old seawolf whom we knew in the Russian navy at Port Arthur and only a few years ago commanded at Kronstadt, but now wears the uniform of a Polish officer; and last of all, the Swiss Colonel de Reynier, a shrewd administrator, impartial, desperately endeavoring to let in a little light of good sense, civilization, and European rationality upon this dusty scrimmage of fanatics.

Are the Germans, whose pride is undoubtedly wounded and whose PanGerman aspirations are blocked by the existence of the Corridor, seriously injured materially? I am told that they are not. Uninterrupted communication between Germany and East Prussia is fully guaranteed by a Convention signed at Paris in April 1921. This provides for the free transit of passengers and merchandise, even military convoys and munitions, between the main part of Germany and East Prussia. The

137

plan works so smoothly that the mixed tribunal set up under the chairmanship of Herr Koch, the Danish Consul-General at Danzig, to settle any disputes under the Convention has not received a single complaint during the last two years.

Statistics show that the number of people and the amount of freight moving by land between Berlin and East Prussia are larger to-day than before 1914. More than that, Danzig is probably the only port in the world whose traffic has doubled since before the war. Practically one fourth of all the trade of Poland passes through that city, and ninety-five per cent of the merchandise that crosses its wharves either comes from or is destined for Poland. But the Danzigers argue that in the good old days they had not only Poland but also Russia, the Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania for their hinterland. They say that if they were left alone they would do very well. fact, political passions are so excited that I question if the people of Danzig would not prefer poverty without the Poles to wealth bestowed by Polish hands. They imagine that the Poles will seize the first favorable opportunity to curtail their liberties and to reduce them to a Polish autonomous municipality. The mere thought of this makes a Danzig citizen furious.

In

I have not told the whole story, but I have told enough to show how serious the situation is. As long as both parties to the controversy continue to look at it from the purely self-centred point of view that governed Europe up to 1914, there is no solution but that of force. . . . As long as the Polish Corridor exists, Germany, which is cut in two by it, will dream of restoring her territorial unity. On the other hand, any device for giving Germany a corridor would cut directly across Polish territory and defeat at a single stroke Poland's

ambition to have a seaport of her own. Assume that, as a measure of conciliation, a plan should be devised to give Germany a single road under her own sovereignty through the Corridor. That narrow line, that tiny ribbon, would make Poland's aspirations unrealizable. It would separate her, not only from Danzig and the mouth of the Vistula, but also from Gdenia, the new port that she is building with French assistance west of Danzig as the beginning of a naval base.

No way out of the difficulty presents itself. As long as we persist in discussing international questions on a basis of our age-old nationalist scholastics and appeal to history, that automatic progenitor of wars, the German plan and the Polish plan cannot be simultaneously realized. The Poles cannot control their great river, the Vistula, and the descendants of the Teutonic Order simultaneously rule over the Baltic Coast. So long as European nations insist upon perpetuating the rivalries of the past, there will of necessity be wars.

Until some new and higher principle controls the European mind, that tragic outcome is inevitable. I speak emphatically and bluntly, because it is well for us to see things just as they are; for we Frenchmen may be called upon to sacrifice ourselves yet again in order to enable the Slavic race to achieve its complete enfranchisement.

Is there a new and higher principle through which this can be avoided? What principle is there that, while leaving each nation free to work out its own destiny, to cultivate its hereditary gifts, will gradually remove this bitter jealousy, this fierce enmity that threatens Europe with destruction? I borrow the formula of a German genius who certified to his own Polish descent. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: 'Europe wishes to become one. Every man of any depth and breadth of mind who has lived during our century has yearned for this great spiritual achievement, has sought to open a way to this new synthesis, has striven to realize in himself the European of the future.'

Are laid.

'MRS. LANGTRY is going to publish her memoirs.' This announcement, recently made in the newspapers, recurred to my memory the other day, during one of my very rare visits to London, when noting the progress of the wave of demolition of ancient houses in St. James's Street. The connection of the two ideas does not seem to be obvious, so some explanation is necessary. On the eastern side of that historic thoroughfare the tide of demolition seems to have stopped for the moment at Lock's, waiting perhaps for the not distant time when the last tall silk hat shall have been sold and ironed by that timehonored firm, which is said to have been converted into a limited liability company! Such a conversion would have saddened the hearts of the three aged men who used to coiffer (we have no English equivalent for this most useful term) the most illustrious heads in the Empire. The most venerable of the elders sat silent at an antique desk casting up figures neatly in an ancestral ledger, which were presently to be transcribed on blue invoices of archaic form. Unlike all other tradesmen's accounts, these bills were a joy to receive, being in those happy days very moderate, not enclosed in vulgar envelopes, but simply folded and sealed with wafers, as was the custom when George III was king. The other ancients, of subaltern rank, were in shirt-sleeves, and their chief occupation was to iron the hats of customers while they

1 From Manchester Guardian (IndependentLiberal daily), February 28

waited. Now nobody needs this glossy reparation, because silk hats are not worn, except by hunting men, whose damaged headpieces are not repaired with a simple coup de fer, and by bishops, whose strings have to be removed before the iron can be applied.

Lock's bow-window, which still contains a faded relic of the sporting efforts of Albert the Good when he devised a crimson headdress for the beaters at Windsor, had for next-door neighbor on the north a well-known druggist's shop, which survived until the other day. On its wall was a plaque which told that the house was once the habitation of Byron. In the early eighties the upper part was the last restingplace of an aged man of letters who was old enough to have seen Byron and to have been the associate of men far senior to the poet, such as Sam Rodgers, who also lived in St. James's parish. This old fellow, whose energetic rancors were unabated though their objects had mostly disappeared, was Abraham Hayward, pamphleteer, historian (in a small way), Quarterly Reviewer of the great days of Quarterly Reviewing, when all the articles were anonymous, yet such was their weight or vigor that the authorship of each was known or conjectured; and for a very brief moment, near the end of his life, he was dramatic critic of 'the Times newspaper' as he used to call it.

In this capacity he came into contact with Mrs. Langtry just at the time when I made his acquaintance. In those days there was a very charming

Hayward were on terms of curious intimacy. No two men were more dissimilar; but they had one bond of union they were both Peelites. The way to rouse Hayward's indignation was to suggest that he was a Whig. ‘I was never a Whig,' he used to cry. 'Like Gladstone, I was a Peelite.' So Mr. Gladstone read attentively Hayward's essay in dramatic criticism, and this induced a correspondence which led to some agreeable incidents. Hayward sat beneath the shadow of Byron's bust and read to me Mr. Gladstone's letters a singular, shriveled little figure he was, with his crinkled white hair and pronounced features. In one of the earliest letters Mr. Gladstone lui tint à peu près ce langage: 'What you tell me about this admirable lady interests me much. Is she married, and is her husband an agreeable man? I

141

should like to make her acquaintance.' In a later letter Mr. Gladstone describes how he is fitting himself for the privilege of knowing Miss Hardcastle. With sedulous earnestness he gets a copy of She Stoops to Conquer and studies the text with the minuteness of a philologist. He finds to his surprise that Goldsmith uses the term 'cantankerousness.' He looks it up in a dictionary, which gives as the only authority for the use of the word the Times newspaper. 'This I consider,' wrote Mr. Gladstone, 'a detestable authority.'

Abraham Hayward lived only a few months after this episode; but Mr. Gladstone survived long enough to be twice again Prime Minister. It is to be hoped that Mrs. Langtry may be able to publish some details of his unofficial life which are not contained in his official biography.