matic writing, telepathy, strange psychic experiences, mental suggestion, mental healing and much else beside until she has attained an intimate and comforting- consciousness of the Divine presence and the reality of things unseen. It was perhaps inevitable that, in describing her experiences, she should criticize sharply the religious beliefs and habits which one by one she was led to discard; and her apprehension that her book may be looked upon as an attack on Christian teachings is to that extent justified; but, whatever estimate may be placed upon her conclusions, her sincerity will scarcely be doubted even by readers who find the paths which she travelled quite as vague and baffling as more ordinary religious experiences seem to her. Henry Holt & Co.

At the psychological moment, surely, just as the world is agitated over the disappearance of the famous painting, comes "Monna Lisa; or The Quest of the Woman Soul." A work of fiction, as the publishers explain, it is ingeniously presented by the author who signs himself Guglielmo Scala, in the form of transcripts from freshly discovered journals and letters of Leonardo da Vinci, and purports to describe the incidents which marked the growth of love-late but intensebetween the painter and the original of the famous portrait. The theme is a daring one, and needs a poet's treatment. But the magnanimity and many-sided genius of the master stand out distinctly, and the historical detail has been carefully filled in. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.

A significant mark of the present religious and social unrest in France has shown itself in a recent English translation of "The Re-appearing (Il Est

He

Resuscité!) A Vision of Christ in Paris," by M. Charles Morice, a French art critic. The book is Gallic in its method, its daring and its real cleverness, but the questions the author raises are universal. The novel tells how on December 11, 1910, and for several days thereafter, the evening papers of Paris contained great blank spaces. The matter puzzled everyone until it appeared that everything false, misleading or not strictly honorable had been omitted. On the 14th a paragraph in small type announced: "The Son of God has no need of advertisement. He is staying at L'Hôtel des Trois Rois on La Place de l'Etoile. will receive, from midday to midday, all day long, this 14th of December and to-morrow." The journalists flocked to the hotel and there, in three hundred different rooms, Jesus received at one and the same time three hundred interviewers. Their stories in the next morning's papers were amazingly good. "The journalists had surpassed themselves, because unconsciously each one had drawn a portrait of himself in colors of glory." The rest of the developments of Christ's stay in Paris are less daring as allegory and more consistently realistic. In every case the basis of modern culture and society are opposed by Christ's quiet assumption of an absolutely opposite standard. In the end, incipient commercial panic inevitably brings about the exile of the Son of God by the authorities. Though "The Reappearing" probably will not create the interest here that it is said to have aroused in France, it deserves recognition as strong satire; it is skilfully written, stimulating to thought and discussion and instinct with stern honesty. It differs from the many other books written around the same idea in its breadth of view, and its lack of devotion to any single ethical purpose. George H. Doran Co.

THE KERRY COW. It's in Connacht or in Munster that yourself might travel wide,

And be asking all the herds you'd meet along the countryside,

But you'd never meet a one could show the likes of her till now, Where she's grazing in a Leinster field, -my little Kerry cow.

If herself went to the cattle fairs she'd put all cows to shame, For the finest poets of the land would meet to sing her fame; And the young girls would be asking leave to stroke her satin coat, They'd be praising and caressing her, and calling her a dote.

If the King of Spain gets news of her be'll fill his purse with gold, And set sail to ask the English King where she is to be sold:

But the King of Spain may come to me, a crown upon his brow,

It is he may keep his golden purseand I my Kerry cow.

The priest maybe will tell her fame to the Holy Pope of Rome,

And the Cardinals' College send for her to leave her Irish home; But it's heart-broke she would be itself to cross the Irish Sea, "Twould be best they'd send a blessing to my Kerry cow and me.

When the Ulster men hear tell of her they'll come with swords and pikes,

For it's civil war there'll be no less if they should see her likes:

And you'll read it on the paper of the bloody fight there's been, An' the Orangeinen they're burying in fields of Leinster green.

There are red cows that's contráry, and there's white cows quare an' wild, But my Kerry cow is biddable an' gentle as a child.

You might rare up kings and heroes on the lovely milk she yields.

For she's fit to foster generals to fight our battlefields.

"ONE CALLED HELP." You came to me, friend, with the chalice of help in your hand, With pardon, and healing for one who was wounded by shame. Ay, straight to my side you came down, through that desolate land;

You brought me the Water of Life: and you called me by name. You were not ashamed to be there in the palace of Sin:

You knelt by my side, and you bade me look out through the bars: Then shattered the bolts that could only be burst from within, And rose with captivity captive once more to the stars.

Muriel G. E. Harris.

The Westminster Gazette.

It has come at last, the democracy which many of us have looked forward to with as much apprehension as others have with hope. And it has come, like all great movements, with a certain dramatic suddenness. While we have been sleeping, the seed has been growing, and almost before we are aware, we have had the blade and the ear preluding the future harvest. "Like a thief in the night”—that is the only comparison which does justice to the suddenness of the phenomenon, or, rather, perhaps, to our sleepy misapprehension of the underground forces which have been working for so long in one single direction. Now, as we look back on the evolution which has been going on for several years, we seem to discover all sorts of signs and portents which might have warned us of what was to come. There was, to begin with, the extraordinary apathy of the English people within recent months, which politicians sought to explain as best they could, and deplored as significant of we know not what obscure social peril. Now we understand what that popular apathy and incuriousness meant. The people refused to be galvanized into interest by subjects like Tariff Reform, or the constitution of the House of Lords, or this or that panacea of strenuous party men in the House. Even on the subject of Irish Home Rule there was rather a sombre acquiescence than any positive decision one way or another. So far as they allowed themselves to be interested in anything, the people in two successive elections declared that if it were true that the House of Peers obstructed radical and popular legislation, they must be done away with. But they were not very keen on the matter, and now we know the reason why. The one absorbing preoccupa

tion in their minds was the social status of the working classes. When are we coming to our own? was the solitary question which arrested their intelligence, to the exclusion of everything else. When shall we, the democracy of England, attain to a position in which we can secure for ourselves that modicum of comfort and ease which we desire? No other topic was of the same burning importance, because, in that obscure fashion in which great movements are engineered, it had suddenly occurred simultaneously to all orders of democratic intelligence that now or never was the appointed time. The working classes were prepared to take the tide at the flood in the hope that it would lead on to their permanent fortune. Everything else held to be significant was only viewed from this political and social angle. Even the Coronation itself failed to impress the people as much as most spectators anticipated, because, preluded as it was by the shipping strike, it had to compete with that topic of tremendous interest, the emergence of Democracy into a position of definite power and authority.

As we look back, the course of development is clear. But, inasmuch as the majority of men take short views, it is not surprising that the sudden arrival of democracy seemed to be abrupt and unexpected. England was confronted with a not dissimilar crisis in 1832, when, as we have now heard ad nauseam, the Duke of Wellington thought it his supreme duty as a statesman to allow a Reform Bill to pass with which personally he did not agree, in order that his Sovereign's prestige might be inviolate, and the safety of the body politic secure. From 1832 onwards dates the rise of the middle

class in England. In earlier centuries the barons had fought the King; now the rising industrialists fought the landed interest. Their hour had struck, and at a time singularly propitious for their welfare. All through the first half of the reign of Queen Victoria the middle classes were coming to their own with a vengeance, and they brought with them that determination to excel in commerce and trade which justified the Napoleonic taunt that we were a nation of shopkeepers. But on the whole it cannot be said that the middle classes used their power in any very estimable or reputable way. They built up large fortunes for themselves. They took their firm stand on principles of individualism. They transformed, according to the measure of their power, the aristocratic Government of England into an oligarchy-an oligarchy of wealthy men. Above all, they inaugurated the reign of money-bags as the sole criterion of civic worth. They used their power selfishly, after all. They did not care very much for the State. They possessed a creed somewhat narrow and inelastic, which became known to the world as the "creed of Manchester," and was promptly parodied in later times by what we now call "Brummagem." "Each one for himself and Devil take the hindermost," was practically the doctrine in which they believed. They aped the classes above them in social extravagance. They kept the class below them, so far as they dared, under their heel.

The reign of the middle class in England was not an attractive period, albeit that it established the commercial superiority of Great Britain. These middle classes had no notion either of the beauty of art, or the beauty of holiness. They were not cultivated, except in a narrow and parochial fashion. Their god was a Jehovah who was on the side of money

bags, and they were almost to a man Little Englanders.

The rise of an Imperialistic spirit was the beginning of the end for the middle class régime. The newer radicalism, as interpreted by Mr. Chamberlain and his followers, included not only certain ideals of Greater Britains in all the Seven Seas, but was expressly founded on the notion of a democracy, whose needs and aspirations had not hitherto been considered. "The people" no longer meant the commercial magnates and the shopkeepers, but included new elements, elements hitherto untried and unknown, which quickly made their mark as soon as the opportunity was given. In faint and elusive manner, also, arose ideas of Collectivism and Socialism, which were the direct antithesis of the Individualism of the middle class. The deep impression made by the Boer War upon the working classes has never yet received its due meed of attention. Obscurely, inarticulately, but determinedly, the people vowed that whatever wars there might be in the future, they should not be waged in the interests of capitalism. Trade Unions, already formidable, began to rise in importance. In labor war after labor war the people won. The Labor Party sprang suddenly into prominence. It came to be recognized that the Demos would have something to say for itself-a Demos by no means opposed to the Imperialistic spirit, and more likely to do justice to the claims of art than the narrow, Puritanical intelligence of the classes immediately above them. We need not carry out the history in detail. In due course of time arose the prophet of the new democracy, Mr. Lloyd George, who, as one of the people, set himself, with absolute consistency of effort and no small measure of statesmanlike prescience, to convert England into a real democracy, partly by definite acts of legislation, such as the Finance Bill of