that the Government Bill will be received with their practically unanimous approval, and we hope that without unnecessary delay it will be passed into

controversialists are driven to the use of arguments like this, their case must be weak indeed. Believing as we do in the tolerance and good sense of our fellow-countrymen, we have little doubt The Saturday Review.

law.

found parties of bees at work on a patch of rose-bay willow herb, on purple rocket, and on the tall spikes of erect veronica. Each blossom was tried several times over, till it had yielded the last drop of nectar, and many times a bee wasted time by licking at an empty cup. But to-day every bee is off to the same harvest-ground, where there are a thousand blossoms for every tongue, and every bloom has honey. They fill the crop in five minutes, or three, where they took twenty or thirty yesterday. Each bee leaves the hive six times as often in the hour as yesterday, and so it seems as though there were six times as many bees at work. Nor can we help thinking that bees that stayed at home when honeysearching was of little profit, have joined the excited throng now. Every one is for the harvest field, now that the honey flow has begun.

Ours is not a first-rate honey district. In fact, for one cause and another, this is the only honey flow we have had this Happier bee-keepers look forward to opening the year with fruit

season.

blossom in May, and to our mind there is not a more delicious honey than that of the apple blossom. When our pear blossom was open, cold weather fell and high winds came, and blew the petals off before the bees could take toll. Then came the hawthorn, and with its opening, another unpropitious time, and the bees have had to get a laborious living from colt's-foot, buttercup, and all sorts of miscellanies. It has been well noted that the hive bee, unlike its wild relatives, when it goes out to forage, continues on the flower it first selected. It is a labor-saving trick. Once you have got the exact knack of a clover blossom, you can go from one to another at increasing speed, landing at the same place, extending the tongue at the same moment to the same length, mechanically and easily, as a cotton girl tends a spindle. It pays the bee, and pays the flower, because by this means there is not all that mixing of foreign pollen that the humble bees and others make in their random, happy-go-lucky fashion. But the hive bee, like anyone else, can adapt herself to circumstances. When flowers of a kind are few and far between, it takes less time to try the blossoms as they come than to give strict attention to their botanical affinity. In the very early spring you will see bees going from crocus to Christmas rose, and even thence to the cold snowdrop, glad to get specks of nectar wherever they can be found. And in suburban gardens their atten

the summer through—until their particular honey flow comes.

The nature of the honey flow is usually notorious enough. If he has not anticipated it, the bee-keeper learns it from the color of his bees' pollen bundles. There is no greater delight than to watch the workers running in from the alighting-board with the rolled balls upon their thighs. The prevailing color is usually yellow, with here and there a flaming orange or, as it seems, a pure scarlet, to make you wonder where this bee has been. Last year, one bee in about ten thousand came home with bags of brilliant plum-purple, but we never found out where she got her burdens. Indigo pollen puzzled us for some time, but it was a frequent bundle, and therefore not difficult to trace. The pollen of the willow herb is of an indiscriminate whitish color till the ball is full, and then it takes on by accumulation this indigo hue. When the honey flow comes, the beekeeper likes to see the bundles a gray that is almost black, for that bundle comes from the white clover, the favorite of all lowland honeys. Ours is not so, the white clover crop being slight in the district, and the little there is, apparently overlooked by the bees. The bees are all flocking to-day to the lime, and each one seems to have decorated her legs with a little round morsel of cream cheese.

They are running into the observatory hive four abreast, a stream that you would think must fill the hive in a few minutes, for somehow we do not notice at the same time a corresponding stream passing out. It is still more fascinating to watch them coming into the garden hive, through a mirror placed on the alighting board, for we can thus stand behind the hive and out of the line of flight of the bees. We can see them fall and stick, then run on as though there was no second to

they come with the visible signs of wealth on their thighs. It seems as though some munificent hand were tumbling all the wealth of the countryside into our money box. Just as in the observatory hive, but on a larger scale, cells are gleaming everywhere with honey. Bees are covering full cells with caps of exquisite whiteness. Some are hanging hand-in-hand for the production of more wax with which to fit walls to the flat foundations we have given them. Nurses are cramming happy grubs, or rather swimming them, in the food that they must eat for themselves in this busy place; others are urging on the queen to lay eggs for a still greater army to take advantage of the sweets that summer is providing so lavishly. Each one has her task, each task its bee, though everything is obviously ordered according to the willingness of each citizen to do the work that lies nearest.

Pollen nowadays is of little account. A week or two ago each forager had the greatest difficulty to get her burden safely into the cell. She ran a furious gauntlet through the nurses, hungering for pollen, and had to shake them off with a maze of dancing turns and twists. Now everyone knows where pollen can be had, and the foragers lose no time in ramming their bundles into a cell and starting off for more. Many bees have been so careless about pollen that they have not rolled it in bundles, but come home smeared with what the flowers have put there. Others have managed to get their honey without ball or dust. We do not see them now searching for pollen, as they did in March. It is an extra, deeply necessary, but so thrown at them by the flowers as to be not worth troubling about. The honey is the thing sought-the pollen is added unto them. Pollen will not keep except at the bottom of a honey cell. It

is excellent summer provender, and without it neither can brood be raised, nor can summer work be sustained. There are always grains of it in the clearest honey, there by a kind of accident, and adding no little to its staminal qualities. To the solitary bee it is more important than honey because immediate eating by the young is the only question. If anyone has dug up the nest of an Anthophora whose grub has not hatched, and whose store of pollen has gone bad, he has never come upon greater nastiness of its size. This is manna which must be eaten to-day, and the needs of the next day gathered to-morrow.

In their wise way our hive bees know all about the keeping of honey, and pollen too. The honey is not just bucketed and sealed, but fanned and warmed and cooled, fermented with the right, but not the wrong, fermentation, preserved with a dash of formic acid, and sealed just in the right condition. We hope there is joy in these chemical niceties, but surely there is joy in the The Nation.

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gathering of the honey flow. der sides of the green lime boughs are a mass of golden stars that beckon you from the sunshine into the indigo shadows, out of the dry sunlight into the moist fragrance of honey temples, out of what breezes may blow into a calm that is soon made musical with humming. Every leaf seems to have become a bell, a fuzzy bell that drones without clangor, that echoes with each stroke. It cannot have been "immemorial elms" in which was heard "the murmur of innumerable bees." elm's wind blossoms are of February. There is no midsummer music to be compared to that of the lindens when the bees have got their blossoms. All the long morning and all the long afternoon they hum there as though there was nothing else than to sing to sleep the drone whose hammock is slung there. Unseen, each one slips away to the hive; unnoted, each empty one takes her place. Only the blossoms hang there all the time with their lazily offered golden reward.

The story of the deplorable outbreak of racial strife in the United States, as a consequence of the prize-fight at Reno, has probably lost nothing in the telling. A large collection of scattered incidents, some of them admittedly tragical enough, always creates an aggregate impression in excess of the actual facts. To onlookers at a distance the savage attacks upon negroes seem hardly to admit of reasonable palliation, but allowance must be made for the exceptional conditions prevailing in America. The intensity of racial antagonism can scarcely be appreciated except by those who have witnessed it on the spot, and on neither side is it wholly blind and unreasoning.

Again, it seems clear that in many cities the blacks were foolishly provocative, and the men they angered were certainly not representative of the better elements of American society. The fight itself appears to have been creditably fair and orderly, despite many sinister predictions to the contrary. The real fault lies with the senseless people who insisted upon regarding it as typical of the conflict between the black and the white races, and who declared that in the result the white race had been humiliated. Absurd talk of this kind is solely responsible for the trouble which has followed. As a matter of fact, the fight proves nothing at all. Jeffries was out

never to have emerged from his retirement. Johnson is probably the best living fighter. These are interesting though not very important personal facts, but they certainly have nothing whatever to do with the relative qualities of the black and white races. A thousand picked American whites would probably beat on equal terms a thousand picked negroes in any conflict or any form of physical endurance. In Africa it is no uncommon thing for a white explorer to excel all his negro followers in strength and staying power. An average muscular Chinese from the northern provinces would probably stand a degree of prolonged fatigue and exposure under which Johnson would break down utterly. These things, too, prove nothing. We should not argue about racial differences from such isolated facts and examples.

When we set aside the nonsense about racial qualities and white humiliation, there yet remains the elementary fact that the American mobs did not like to see a white man beaten by a negro. That feeling is not, we think, confined to America, and we may as well be frank about all that it implies. It is very easy for us in England, where we have no color problem, to talk with indignation and abhorrence of the lynchings and the outrages which occur so frequently in the Southern States of America. We have yet to see how the English would act, as a race, if confronted with entirely similar conditions. There is much reason to fear that our attitude would be no more tolerant. Experience shows that, away from the Southern States, Americans are far more ready than Englishmen to mix with colored races on terms of equality. These considerations in no sense condone the abominable lynchings in America, but they help us to realize their meaning, and ought to make us slow to condemn them without

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America is perhaps the most difficult political problem in the world. It is not rendered any easier by the consciousness that historically the white race is almost wholly in the wrong, and that when it sought to atone for its sins it went too far at one step. The very advances of the negro population seem to have the ultimate effect of increasing racial antagonism. An able Frenchman, M. Jean Finot, has contended that within fifty years American negroes have advanced further than Germany did during the eight centuries between Julius Cæsar and Charlemagne. contention is more admissible than the general results of M. Finot's researches into race prejudice. He holds that there are no essential differences between negroes and whites, and that under equal and identical conditions they must eventually arrive in America at much the same result. He ignores, we think, the determining factor of climate. Alone among the great races of the world the African negroes have done nothing. The deadening influence of the climate of Africa arrested their development during countless centuries. They never sailed the seas or swept conquering across continents or founded great civilizations. Transplanted they have achieved much, but the gulf of ages is not bridged in fifty years. As a race they are still too near the forests and the swamps of Africa.

The real origin of race prejudice when allied to questions of color lies almost exclusively in the fear of the intermingling of the sexes. Americans dread the appearance in their midst of a large race of color hybrids. The danger is probably less to-day than it has ever been, but the fear of it grows more intense as the negro population increases. Australian opposition to colored immigrants arose far more from an instinctive antagonism to mixture of race than from jealousy of labor

competition. Lord Cromer has recently published some interesting speculations on the subject, in which he has conjectured that "antipathy based on differences of color is a plant of comparatively recent growth." He supports his contention by a number of proofs drawn from Greek and Roman history. We venture to say that it would be perfectly easy to collect an even larger number of examples of the same sort from the history of the last hundred years. The fact remains that color inter-marriages are generally detested to-day. It is not a purely white prejudice, and it is not an example of the arrogance of the white races. It is shared in an equal degree, for instance, by the better classes of the people of India and of Japan. It is even felt by the bulk of the respectable negro population of America, who dislike the idea of their women marrying whites. We believe it is not usually due on either side to a feeling of racial superiority, except, for excellent reasons, among white Americans.

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to a limited extent the outcome of physical repulsion, as is shown by the occasional temporary and irregular unions which are formed. But the broad instinctive feeling of most great races is against color inter-marriages, and has probably been so throughout all history. All the philosophical generalizations in the world, all the marshalling of striking exceptions, will not alter this deep-seated and salutary human instinct. Where the danger is multitudinous, and specially aggravated by disparity, as in America, it produces racial antipathies which are fierce and ineradicable. They point to the natural conclusion that it is not good for races of different colors to live together in vast numbers in the same country. As these conditions are unalterable in America, the antagonism they involve ought never to be wantonly provoked; and we hope and believe that the conscience of the American people will in future make itself effectively felt against such exploitations as the Reno fight.

If Mrs. Julia De Wolf Addison's judgments of American painters and sculptors be occasionally curt, her "The Boston Museum of Fine Arts" is among the most interesting of the great num. ber of similar manuals written by her, and its illustrations are chosen with her wonted good taste. The great va riety of subjects to be treated includes so many of which popular knowledge is small, that it was necessary to make many chapters very instructive, thus limiting the space for enumeration and description, but giving the book far more value to those intending to use it as a guide through the Museum. The introduction contains a brief history of

the institution, and plans of the ground and main floors accompany it. Five chapters are given to pictures and prints, and separate chapters to Persian art, amber, glass, pottery and porcelain; the Egyptian department; the classical department; Greek vases and coins; Chinese and Japanese sculpture, painting, metal work, lacquer and Japanese prints, and Oriental pottery and porcelain. This bare enumeration does inadequate justice to the variety of subjects treated, for Mrs. Addison neglects none of the important de. tached groups or objects, and foreign readers will find the volume more than a fair substitute for a complete cata