Wine and the Chicken Coop

M. JOUBERT is the professor of agriculture at Fontainebleau, and an enterprising gentleman to boot. It is his duty and his pleasure to discover more productive methods of farming, and he leaves no stone unturned in his eager search for improvements. Let American barnyard savants concoct new formulas of 'Lay-or-Bust' bran on a basis of dynamite and excelsior; France is heir to a nobler tradition. M. Joubert is also a humane man. He believes that what he enjoys his hens should be allowed to enjoy too - if it is good for them. He therefore decided to initiate these useful birds to the ecstasies of the grape. Selecting a particularly fine dozen of eighteen-monthold hens, he divided them into two groups of six. The unlucky ones were put on a Wayne B. Wheeler diet; the others were given each day one tenth of a litre of wine apiece. The teetotalers laid three eggs in the month of October, one in November, none at all in December, and in January twentythree. The scofflaws, on the other hand, produced twenty-eight eggs in October, fifty-seven in November, fifty-four in December and fifty-seven in January. We refrain from pointing the moral.

Limericks and Religion

BOTH the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England have enlisted the limerick as a means of propagating the faith among the young. The Catholic priest who signs himself 'G. R. P.' says in the introduction to his limerick prayer-book: 'The heresiarch Arius, in order to spread his false teaching, composed ballads of heretical doctrine in the popular metre of the day.

There was a wise man who said, 'Prayer
Is as simple as breathing the air,

If you always recall,
Whatsoever befall,

That your Heavenly Father is there.

A rector in Devonshire has devised a religious-limerick calendar. This is the entry under June, the month of the Sacred Heart:

In June English weather is hot
(Or should be though sometimes it's not),
Like the love in God's heart,
Once pierced by a dart

For the biggest and tiniest tot.

Devonshire is also responsible for a stanza celebrating Saint Thomas of Canterbury, which runs:

Dear children, your patron is dead.
Wicked soldiers cut open his head.

Though your head you'll not lose,
Still you can if you choose

Be as holy, by praying, instead.

Rough Stuff at Eton

THE English proverb that Eton produces gentlemen, Winchester men, and Harrow cads, may have to be revised. A recent issue of the Eton College Chronicle contains a plea, signed by one P. J. C. Hollick and the youthful Lord Furneaux, son of Lord Birkenhead, begging for cleaner play in the House Matches. These matches, in which Rugby and Association football are combined, are peculiar to the school. 'It is distressing' - or at any rate that is the way these young aristocrats feel - 'to see in the House ties at Eton deliberate kicking and fisting which would not cast any lustre on a fifthrate soccer club.' Luckily, 'the number of good players who stoop to such methods is wholly inconsiderable' in fact, to play unfairly is a sign of incompetence on the face of it. Matters have become so serious that fouls are now going to be penalized, and 'it is hoped that after a few of these the advantage of deliberate kicking will begin to appear questionable.' Should this penalty prove insufficient, the offenders are to be kicked off those very playing fields on which the Battle of Waterloo was won. The announcement of these

changes closes with this large-minded reflection: 'It is unwillingly that we propound such drastic measures, but one must move with the times.'

English As She Is Sung

DURING the recent congress of Englishspeaking Orientals in Japan new variants of several popular songs were evolved in the course of the celebrations. Since the visitors all spoke the English language, they felt that they ought to be in the musical traditions

that native and American-born speakers of the language perpetuate. That delightful old Northumbrian folk-song, 'It Ain't Gonna Rain No More,' was therefore chanted in this strange shape:

Engonnarennomo, no mo,
Engonnarennomo.
Hauna herru oda hoks terru
Engonnarennomo?

The next on the programme was 'O Brack Joe,' as they called him. This number opened with the words, 'Gau narra des wen maalt wayunga ge.' After this came a livelier 'Yes, sir, that's my baby, which is worth reprinting in its complete form. We trust our readers know the usual words.

Аст І 'Great stuff!'

A Hindu wife who cut off her husband's nose was sentenced to six months' imprisonment. The husband said he returned home with a friend late at night and told his wife to prepare tea. His wife abused him and he slapped her face. Later the wife chopped off her husband's nose with a hatchet when he was asleep. Westminster Gazette

The Dominions have increased their tariffs in a greater ratio than our foreign customers. We shall make a great mistake, as Mr. Runciman warned us, if we depart from our leadership of the world as a Free Trade nation, especially with the impressive manifesto of the bankers and manufacturers reverberating in our ears and actually reaching Mr. Coolidge.

Westminster Gazette

Let Mr. Churchill devise a system of taxation for revenue purposes which will bear, not on the British, but on the foreign manufacturer, and he

will go some way toward relieving his own troubles and those of the country at large.

*

Morning Post

Three people were killed and 293 injured every day during July, August, and September last in London's streets.

In one year 853 people were killed and there were 40,173 accidents that were not fatal.

Morning Post

'The British Empire,' says the Committee's report, 'depends essentially, if not formally, upon positive ideals. Free institutions are its lifeblood. Free coöperation is its instrument.'

What a magnificent shutting of eyes to facts! 'Free institutions are its lifeblood.' Whereas, in fact, of the 450,000,000 inhabitants of the Empire, over 350,000,000 know nothing whatever of free institutions. - Daily Herald

We have suffered a good deal in the past from the American politico-social movie. We have hated their sentiment and their snobbery and their stunts, their vulgarity and their morals and said nothing. We have suffered their stars and their producers, their business magnates and their publicists - and said just as much as they wanted us to say. We have shrunk from what we considered their blatant patriotism.

A new brochure advertised in the latest catalogue of the State Publishing House in Moscow, under 'Children's Reading':

IRKUTOV, A. The March.

The children of imprisoned American workers organize a march to Washington, to beg for the liberation of their fathers. During their meetings on the way the little demonstrators meet with live sympathy from the workers. The President refuses to receive them, but several bourgeois ladies get up relief for these hungry children, who, however, repudiate it with indignation.

A live tale. Concrete episodes. Revolutionary tone. Calculated for the school child and the Pioneer.

[J. St. Loe Strachey in the Spectator]

MR. PHILIP GUEDALLA has achieved success in his Palmerston. He has developed an entirely new historical technique, and has triumphantly proved its value. He has not attempted to tell in detail the story of Palmerston's life and work, to make précis of his letters and speeches, or to analyze his political principles. Instead, he has created a Palmerston atmosphere. At first it seems a luminous mist in which we watch vast and shadowy forms moving distractedly. Gradually, however, out of the mist one great figure emerges, and Palmerston the man, and the greatest of political experts, stands revealed. We find, as if by a kind of enchantment, that Palmerston has come to life.

Palmerston had in the strict sense no Party, no colleagues, no followers. He could lead, and he could act with others, quite loyally and efficiently. But all the time he was looking over their heads to the British people and making them his friends and supporters. He talked uncommon good sense in the wittiest, simplest way, and somehow suggested that he was the man they all really wanted. And he was. His countrymen said in effect, 'We don't care a twopenny dam about his views, but we do know that he's a devil of a fellow. There's no nonsense about him. He never talks through his hat, or poses or pretends to be what he is n't. He never acts a part, but is always himself.' And this praise was true. 'Pam' never stood on his dignity, or finessed, or tortured past words to prove himself to have been always consistent. Therefore the country gave Palmerston an individual position different from that of every other statesman of his generation.

Curiously enough, it was the girl queen, Victoria of happy memory, who in the first year of her reign best summed up Palmerston's way of winning men's hearts and heads. He was at her first Council, and, next to Melbourne, saw her most intimately and most often in the first six weeks. She laughed at his jokes and found him 'a clever

_ and agreeable man' and so 'very clear in what he says.' Thegreater British public noted exactly the same qualities, and loved him for them. He spoke his mind clearly and without reserve, and did it, not brutally, but with verve, humor, and a pleasant manner - that is, clearly and agreeably.

to the hilt the charge which I, in common with others, made at the time - that the 'Documents' published in 1914 were not a frank disclosure of the truth, but were carefully selected and expurgated in order to remove from them any unfortunate admissions which would have thrown doubt on the story which Lord Grey and his colleagues were 'putting across the British public.

Mr. Headlam-Morley's claim that the new publication shows that our 'suspicions were absolutely unfounded' is a piece of bland imperti

nence.

That, however, by the way. The important thing is the new light thrown upon the business by the evidence then suppressed but now revealed.

For the most part it seems to confirm what one had already suspected. There were in the Foreign Office in those critical days two points of view. The one, represented by Lord Grey himself, was working, in a rather panic-stricken fashion, for peace. The other, represented by the chief permanent officials, was convinced from the beginning that peace was impossible, and was chiefly concerned with making sure that, despite political difficulties at home, we should - in a phrase used by Lord Nicolson in a dispatch on July 28 'not hesitate to do our duty' by France and Russia.

Lord Grey was nerveless, hesitant, easily turned from one scheme to another. That he could calmly go away to the New Forest for the week-end in the gravest days of the crisis is a measure of his capacity. His advisers were telling him from the first that it was no use, that 'the resources of diplomacy were exhausted.' In such an atmosphere, and with a man of such weak will and such limited abilities, failure was inevitable.

Of the attitude of 'the Office' - and, in particular, of Sir Eyre Crowe and Lord Nicolson there is ample evidence.

So early as July 24 Sir Eyre Crowe is arguing in a minute: