tensions that we have had to postulate in the first place. These tensions he is obliged to convey to us through intellectual means. Yet his heroes are tortured by their absolute inability to discover their true character. Pirandellism, in so far as it is systematic, is exaggerated, and falls thus into a purely intellectual game, a pleasant form of dialectics. In this sense, but in this sense only, Pirandello can be accused of being an intellectualist. Agnosticism is never stirring, never tragic, especially when it is based on pure logic. Of course, Pirandello has passed the stage of saying 'What do I know?' This superior realism which he has attained,

whose secrets he knows so well, has prevented him from following up the line he had taken when he wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author.

It would have been surprising had this author, one of the most fluid writers of our time, remained faithful to a doctrine that would have held him still. He knows too well that there are no eternal truths, and that people who believe that they have found them are only dupes of their own illusions, and are prematurely dead. Such people are unable to distinguish the full implications of any given moment of time. They lack definite orientation and wide freedom of choice.

As we leave the Dardanelles the sun is rising. The gray-green rocky shores with their scanty vegetation, where British and Anzac troops fought their vain and losing battle, lie wrapped in Sunday peace. Our tidy white steamer turns westward, and off the starboard bow a low-lying ribbon of land marks the European glacis of Asiatic Turkey. Our first port is Dedeagach. In the days of the Turks it was a sleepy little place where a few banks had branches to finance the export of silk cocoons. Later the Bulgarians held it for a period and it became an important frontier post with a large garrison. Now the Greeks are in possession and are trying to convert it into a metropolis. Several thousand refugees from Asia Minor have settled here, and thousands of little cottages dot the shore and spread inland. But there is no work for these newcomers, most of whom are destitute. They are the great problem in this country, because the immigrant Greeks from Asia Minor crowd into cities and shun the fields. Eventually they will be forced to accommodate themselves to practical necessities, as the Zionists have done in Palestine, and to exchange the counter and the workbench for the spade and the plough.

I am more and more convinced that this violent transplanting of more than two and one-half million Turks, Bulgars, and Rumanians is no credit to our age and civilization, but a barbarous concession to overheated na

1 From Kölnische Zeitung (Conservative daily),

May 4

tionalism. Nevertheless it is a fact, and we must reconcile ourselves to facts. Unquestionably the active and enterprising Greeks have brought back with them, on their return from two thousand years in exile in another continent, the good qualities of their ancient motherland. They will make good.

Kavala, famous as a shipping port for high-grade tobacco, has been transformed from a hummocky little coast town into a city of several hundred thousand people. The shores of the broad bay and all the land far back into the adjoining mountains are covered with cottages and warehouses. At this point the refugees have been able to find employment. To-day happens to be a Grecian national holiday. Shops and factories are closed, bells are ringing, and Greek songsno longer heard in Constantinopleare sung in drinking places. The weather god slumbers and the sea is as smooth as glass. The canvas of the little coasting boats in the harbor hangs limp and lifeless. But to-morrow will be busy again, for the town ships five or six million dollars' worth of tobacco annually through Trieste to Dresden. Skillful advertising has given it the reputation of being the choicest in the world.

Saloniki, the pearl of the Egean, lies before us. She used to be a typical Turkish-European city, with her streets all corners and a population of something under one hundred thousand, of whom ninety per cent were Jews.

Her navigators, mechanics, laborers, longshoremen, and even her rowdies, who made much trouble for the Turkish police, were Jews—mostly Sephardim, or Spanish Jews, blonde, leathery men. But since the great migration of peoples which is driving a million and a half Greeks out of Anatolia, Saloniki has made mighty strides forward. Like Kavala, only on a larger scale, - she has spread out around the whole harbor and back into the surrounding heights. Everywhere you see little new cottages where exiles live and reflect on their lot. Saloniki has not enough work for her new hundred thousand, although she too ships tobacco to Dresden and has an active trade in Bulgarian flour and white beans. In fact, you are impressed here by the extent to which the commerce of this coast is fed by the Balkan States. Great herds of beef cattle are driven in from the back countryworthy veterans rewarded for twenty years of faithful service at the plough with the butcher's knife; though, to be sure, there are a few young heifers and steers among them, and also black buffalo, staring their stupid surprise at being called upon to make a sea journey.

Saloniki's hopes have not been fulfilled. Her roomy, well-protected harbor is empty. Only a few Italian flags are visible at the anchorage. The free port assigned to Serbia yawns vacantly, for up to the present Greece and Yugoslavia have not become reconciled. Close to the beach to the east of the city lies Villa Alatini, embedded in green shrubbery. It was there that Abdul-Hamid was imprisoned for several months by the Young Turks, together with two of his wives, in constant fear of his life, and only too ready to sign the checks against his deposits abroad that his jailers laid before him. To-day this episode in the

life of the last real Sultan has been forgotten; the World War and the world peace have intervened, and before long no one will recall who Abdul-Hamid

was.

Until the Balkan wars Saloniki was a focus of both Greek and Bulgarian educational activity. The Greeks defended their ancient cultural centre obstinately, and with lavish subsidies, against the young and aggressive propaganda of the Bulgars. All Slavic Macedonia rallied to the schools of the latter nation. To-day Hellas is on top.

Piræus. Here the activity is a surprise. The ancient port's excellent but narrow harbor can hardly hold the shipping. Traffic seems to be ten times as large as formerly. Order, system, and discipline have taken the place of the din and confusion that used to reign here before the war. Our Customs and passport examinations pass off smoothly and expeditiously. The Greek is appreciatively receptive toward any recognition of his good qualities, and when you remark that to-day the automobiles and taxicabs are lined up in perfect order, that fares are strictly regulated, that the streets are swept, that the porters demand only their legal fees, they smile and say the new Government is responsible for that. The police are well organized. When they catch a criminal, there is no more arguing and political dickering; he is promptly dragged off to prison. So far as I can learn, the people like to have a strong hand over them. In fact, the whole mood of the nation has changed. It has been hardened and sobered by adversities, and is weary of politics. In the last respect the people remind me of the spectators at a theatre when a play is dragged out too long. Therefore, when an energetic man strides out from behind the scenes and orders the curtain down, they applaud him.

THERE is always some actuality in the question of marriage. Of late there has been rather more than usual. To this various causes have contributed. There is first, and doubtless above all, the growingly acute realization of a new attitude toward marriage on the part of the young. Then there have been the remarkable revelations of the deep and serious nature of this new attitude contained in Judge Ben Lindsey's Revolt of Modern Youth (a book which, strangely, has not yet been made available to the English reader, though published a year ago), and, still more remarkable, his articles on "The Moral Revolt,' now appearing in the American Red Book. There is, again, The Book of Marriage, lately published, in which Count Hermann Keyserling, one of the most notable pioneers in social thinking to-day, has set forth, with singular courage and thoroughness, what he regards as the ideal of the marriage order we are now approaching. Mr. Bernard Shaw refused to contribute to that book, because, he said, whatever is written about marriage must 'consist chiefly of evasions.' That is hardly the attitude of the new generation, and the difficult problems of marriage are to-day faced with an absence of evasion which half a century ago would have been almost impossible.

It is sometimes said that the belief in a new attitude of youth is merely an illusion due to the legend of a prim

1 From the Saturday Review (London Conservative weekly), April 23

and prudish Victorian age. Venerable ladies write to the Times to tell of the audacities and escapades of the young in their youth. But while we have always to recognize that the past grows tame and conventional in retrospect, there is more than that to be said. What we witness to-day is not merely the passing effervescence of high-spirited youth. The new moral attitude can also be serious, for it rests on a new conception of life, for which youth of to-day can often give chapter and verse. As Dr. Beatrice Hinkle has lately remarked, two generations ago there was the emancipation of the slaves; in the last generation there was the woman's movement, still in progress; and now we have whether or not we altogether approve of it—what may be called 'the emancipation of youth.' We used to hear about this being 'the century of the child'; the child is now a few years older. We may perhaps remember for our reassurance that there is nothing in this movement revolutionary; it is rooted in the traditions of the past and the natural outgrowth of all that has gone before, especially of the general woman's movement. Formerly the place in life of sex and of marriage was largely determined by the legal and social subordination of women; since it was unfair to allow a woman sexual responsibilities which she was not in a condition to bear, it became the part of a chivalrous and high-minded man to accept these responsibilities for her. It was not easy to live up to that ideal, so disaster was always oc

curring. Now, when women are becoming enabled to pull their own weight in responsibility, the chivalrous ideal of the man who thinks and acts for the woman as well as for himself has grown out of date. And since the new attitude of youth is largely, though not entirely, an attitude of women, we have that 'emancipation' which some view with alarm because it is yet untried, and others with hope because they know, not only that the old ideal is decayed, but that it never really worked outside narrow limits.

Our age, like every other age, is one of transition, and that means that we always have with us a part of the past as well as of the future. In other words, there is always continuity; change, so far from being a radical novelty, is the most conservative of ancient traditions.

The change in the sphere of marriage which has dominated the field for half a century past has been the spread of facilities for divorce. There has indeed been a struggle between the party chiefly concerned for the stability of marriage and the party chiefly concerned about its reality, both on the side of marriage, though they have differed about the desirability of divorce. But notwithstanding these differences, the divorce movement has proceeded, slowly but steadily, in all civilized lands, not only in those of Protestant tradition, where we expect to find it, but also in those of Catholic tradition. In no civilized country is there any progressive movement for adding to the legal impediments to divorce. The natural goal, already attained here and there, seems to be divorce by mutual consent, provided that no rights of the parties themselves or of their children are injured. The stress is now, indeed, on the children, the fruit of the marriage union, rather than on the union, for to-day a mar

riage no longer necessarily means a family, and it is mainly the family which makes the legal regulation of marriage desirable. The really revolutionary change by which a hundred years ago the population of Europe, which for a thousand years had remained almost at the same level, suddenly began to double itself was a really portentous event, the significance of which is scarcely yet realized, notwithstanding the masterly manner in which Professor East in his Mankind at the Crossroads has set forth the problem of the approaching overpopulation of the world. It is a problem which the Population Conference, to be held this year at Geneva, under the auspices of distinguished men of science, will doubtless still further clarify. But the question of marriage may nowadays be considered separately.

We witness, then, a great movement for the legal facilitation of divorce, which is everywhere actively or passively accepted. At the moment, however, when its triumph seems assured, and its results not likely to be undone, we also witness the beginning of another movement. Divorce may be said to be an aspect of the Protestant Reformation, an assertion of individuality and freedom and truth against what seemed the fiction of the Catholic conception of marriage. But in its achievement the sound core of the Catholic conception was overlooked. Catholic marriage represented not merely a sexual union, but a conception of life, a religious life, in which sexual union was only one of the bonds, and not so supremely important that to break it involved the dissolution of the marriage. Nor is that large conception peculiar to the Catholic Church; it is found more or less clearly in India, in China, even among the more primitive people of New Guinea studied by Dr. Malinowski. The Catholic Church was