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Cat and Candle, by Palle Rosenkrantz. Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1926. $2.00.

BARON ROSENKRANTZ is a Dane. Perhaps neither his title nor his nationality should influence the reader, but there is always a certain social glamour about an aristocrat, and a certain intellectual prestige in being a Dane. Cat and Candle is readable and amusing largely on account of the ease with which it was written. The story is of slight importance; it deals with the love and financial adventures of two young friends. There is very little real cleverness in the book; yet if one were to assign it a place in fiction it would undoubtedly have to be classified among the sophisticated novels. One can easily imagine Baron Rosenkrantz in time becoming the Aldous Huxley of Denmark. It is unfortunate that one loses so much in the translation, for there are evidently many light touches in the original that put on considerable weight when transferred into English. There is one surprise that the American reader alone can enjoy - we learn that in Denmark Red Grange is a homestead and not a

superman.

Stepsons of France, by P. C. Wren. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1926. $2.00.

It is doing Captain Wren full justice to say that these seventeen stories are in the early- some would say best - Kipling tradition, the Kipling of Soldiers Three; and the comparison, however enduring, must not depreciate the fresh vigor of this material. The Foreign Legion, with its potpourri of desperate and despairing men, its redhot campaigns in desert and jungle, its juicy Grand-Guignol cruelty, affords enough adventure for any strong palate. If the tales are more sanguinary and less subtle than their model (due perhaps to the absence of women - gentle or otherwise from the Legion's posts), they are fully as versatile. Wide is their map, dramatic their portrayal of battles, murders, and sudden deaths, and romantic the circumstances that have driven each soldier to such oblivion. Captain Wren knows all the tricks of the Legion's trade; knows the little national traits and dialects that distinguish men black and white; knows best of all how to excite one's interest.

The Pope, by Jean Carrère. Translated by Arthur Chambers. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1926. $3.00.

THOSE who turn to this, the latest of M. Carrère's volumes, with the expectation of finding in it either a biography of the present incumbent of the throne of Saint Peter or a full account of the prerogatives and duties of the pontifical office will experience disappointment. With greater accuracy the author might have entitled his work, 'A Journalist's Historical Sketch of the Roman Question.' Long years of residence in Rome, full sympathy with the point of view of the Vatican, and excellent opportunities to sound influential quarters for expressions of opinion as the times have changed, make it possible for M. Carrère to write fully, if now and then tediously, upon the still unsolved question of the Pope's temporal power. Though written first of all for a French audience, American Catholics who wish to watch the development of the international affairs of the Holy See will find this book of interest. It is not, however, fully abreast of the times, as events since the latter months of 1923 find no mention.

The Kasidah, by Sir Richard Burton. Illustrated by John Kettelwell. New York: Brentano's, 1926. $2.00.

THIS is the first inexpensive edition of the longish reflective poem which Sir Richard Burton amused himself by writing in his intervals of leisure on his return from Mekka in 1854. By composing it five years before the appearance of Fitzgerald's Omar, Burton anticipated any charge of imitation, and indeed, similar as the Kasidah is to the tentmaker's Rubaiyat in philosophy, it is too remote from it in style to make any such anticipation necessary. Burton's atheism was in itself as weighty as Fitzgerald's, and his epicureanism as thoroughgoing, but he was not a poet and Fitzgerald was, and that difference tells the whole critical story of the two poems as poems. The Kasidah is too co monplace in style ever to give a reader the specific thrill of poetry, - 'Yet ah! that spring should vanish with the rose!' - but it is nevertheless the work of an extremely interesting man, and commands a certain attention simply as such. Fundamentalists are not advised to invest.

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ASIA: A SHORT HISTORY

A

By

HERBERT HENRY GOWEN

Herbert Henry Gowen, D.D., was born at Great Yarmouth, England. From 1886 to 1890 he was in charge of Chinese missions in Honolulu, and he has been in charge of Japanese missions in Seattle. Since 1906 he has been Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature in the

University of Washington at
Seattle. He is a Fellow of the Royal
Geographical Society, of the Royal
Asiatic Society and a member of the
American Oriental Society. He is
the author of numerous books,
including "An Outline History of
China."

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SIA, with the countless and varying currents of racial, political and religious feeling and activity running through her history, with her great figures of romance, such as Timur the Lame, Jenghiz Khan, Akbar the Great, and that Western adventurer in the East, Marco Polo, is a field tempting to an historian. The author treats these currents with full recognition of their primary importance, but also sees the influence of great men, whether conquerors or mystics, in changing the tides of the world's story.

Dr. Gowen, Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, is, however, far less interested in the exotic story of Asia for its own sake than he is in enabling the people of contemporary

AZAM SHAH, THIRD SON OF AURUNGZEB

THE GREAT MOGHUL, BABER, ON HIS
WAY TO BATTLE

America to understand the
peoples of Asia through their
social and political back-
grounds. The author believes
that the life of the world is approaching an era in
which the countries bordering the Pacific Ocean will
come to the forefront, and that the preservation of peace
among those nations depends upon their understanding
of each other's history, problems and racial differences.
This understanding will be made clearer if each nation
has before its eyes the development of its neighbors in the
present and their hopes for the future.

As a contribution to the cause of peace through education, Dr. Gowen's book appears in its most serious light, and takes on an added importance. To compress into a single volume the vast and intricate life story of a continent is seemingly an almost impossible task, but it has been ably accomplished.

436 pages. With 12 illustrations and 7 maps. 8vo. Cloth. $3.50
When ordering please add ten cents for postage

ATLANTIC MONTHLY BOOK SHOP

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8 ARLINGTON STREET

BOSTON, MASS.

1IVING AGE. Published weekly. Publication othce, RUMFGRD BUILDING, CONCORD, N. H.

1 and General Offices, 8 Arlington Street, Boston 17, Mass.

as second-class matter at the Post Office at Concord NH

15c a copy, $5.00 a year; foreign postage $1.50. under the Act of Congress March 1840

THE LIVING AGE

VOL. 329-JUNE 19, 1926-NO. 4276

THE LIVING AGE

BRINGS THE WORLD TO AMERICA

A WEEK OF THE WORLD

AFTER THE STRIKE IS OVER

MIDDLE- and upper-class England upper-class England emerged from the general strike with an enlarged bump of self-complacency and immense admiration for Mr. Baldwin. Even journals politically opposed to the Premier hailed his attitude throughout the conflict, and above all immediately after its conclusion, with acclamation. The Liberal Nation and Athenæum said that Mr. Baldwin had 'consolidated his position as the most universally popular Prime Minister in British history,' and assured its readers that 'the spectacle of Mr. Baldwin wearing laurels is in no way disagreeable to us.' This did not prevent its picking flaws in the Government's handling of the strike and the settlement, but it represented a great concession from the organ of an Opposition Party. The Conservative Saturday Review spoke more in character when it asserted that 'the strike has greatly enhanced Mr. Baldwin's reputation and made his position in the Party impregnable.' Borrowing its figure from the cricket field, the Out

look, a paper of kindred sympathies, declared: 'Mr. Baldwin, by common consent, hardly made a mistake; he batted evenly on a fiery wicket, and was not out at the close'; and added more soberly elsewhere: 'Out of all this chaos the man who emerges with the most enhanced reputation is the Prime Minister. Mr. Baldwin has deserved well of the nation. Through the almost intolerable strain and stress of the last three weeks, he has kept both his head and his temper, and in doing so he has enabled the nation to do likewise.'

The New Statesman characterized the beginning of the strike as a victory of a Cabinet 'War Party,' headed by Mr. Winston Churchill, over the Prime Minister and Lord Birkenhead, who were fighting desperately for peace. The Premier 'was faced with the immediate resignation of seven of his colleagues, Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Bridgeman, Amery, "Jix," Cunliffe-Lister, and one other of whose identity we are not sure,' - and finally yielded to the majority. 'He ought not to have given way, of course, Copyright 1926, by the Living Age Co.

but excuses may perhaps be found for an utterly exhausted man who, having fought the trade-unions for days and nights, found himself called upon at the last moment to fight his own colleagues.' At any rate, the Prime Minister quickly recovered his footing, so that when the strike ended 'Mr. Baldwin had regained control of his Cabinet and had acquired so enormous a personal popularity in the country that he could afford to let all his colleagues resign if they wanted to. He took charge of affairs without consulting anybody, and without any Cabinet authorization - which would certainly not have been forthcoming from the fight-to-a-finish section - he declared peace and insisted upon peace.' Most laudatory of all, however, was the Spectator, which declared jubilantly that the one fact in regard to which all men were agreed was the preeminence of Mr. Baldwin. 'Without any calculation, without any ambitious intent, without any effort of selfcentred will, he has leapt into a position or rather the British people have taken him upon their shoulders and lifted him into a position - such as no Prime Minister has occupied since the days of William Pitt.

Mr. Baldwin, in his short civil war, like Lincoln in the three years' agony of the American Republic, had a double allegiance to fulfill his allegiance to the country as a whole, and his allegiance to his own side and his principles.' A contributor wrote elsewhere in the same journal: 'It is clearly the Prime Minister first, the rest nowhere. Mr. Baldwin has gone from strength to strength. England has found in him her Abraham Lincoln. An infinite patience, a perfect courage, a calm and steadiness quite complete - here without hyperbole and exaggeration was a "pilot who weathered the storm."'

England's self-complacency, which

we imagine was substantially justified, was rather whimsically focused on the humorous good-nature with which the people as a whole encountered a tremendous domestic crisis. Never was the nation's faith in democracy shaken for a single moment. Never was there an instant's praying for a Mussolini. Several references were made to the fact that more blood was shed and more people were arrested in Paris during the Royalist riots on Jeanne d'Arc Day, which occurred almost simultaneously with the climax of the strike in England, 'than in the whole of Great Britain.' Although the offices of the Daily Mail, the most belligerently antiLabor newspaper of the moment, and those of the British Worker, the fiery champion of the trade-unions, were only a few doors apart, and immense crowds gathered outside their buildings to watch their operations, the people 'were as peaceable as lambs.' In Wellington Street, where the British Gazette - the Government's provocative news-sheet-was published, other crowds gathered regularly and watched the volunteers bringing in huge rolls of paper for the presses and hurrying away with the truckloads of printed papers. Here likewise 'there were hoots, of course; there was quite an amount of jeering and comic advice to those who were carting and shifting the paper. But there was never the slightest hint of an ugly situation.'

Again, the buses whose windows had been smashed when passing through some of the rougher quarters of the city ran thereafter with the empty frames boarded over and chalked announcements printed on them, such as 'Emergency Exit,' or 'Aerated Bus Company' - a play upon the Aerated Bread Company's chain restaurants all over London. The special constables, of course, received their share of spoofing. One of them, who bore down

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