whom had in a way to learn their business under new conditions, pressed on, until ten years and a half after its commencement the work was officially announced to be complete. Much of it has, of course, been hurried, and much of it will require years of labor to become what an engineer on the Great Northern would pronounce solid; but still a railway has been carried through the wide steppes and endless forests, and over the broad rivers-there are thirtynine miles of bridges-and through the thinly inhabited but amazingly broad valleys of Siberia, on to Vladivostock and the shore of the Northern Pacific, with no break save at Lake Baikal, where mighty steamers built to break ice, carry the train bodily for forty miles. Americans would be proud of such a feat, and we do not see why the European jealousies of Russia should prevent a frank acknowledgment that she has added much to the power of communicating within the world, and has brought the less accessible half of Asia into direct touch with Europe. The trains at present must be few and must be slow, and experience will bring out defects that it will cost millions to remove while the line is almost lost in regions so vast and so thinly populated; but still if the Czar wished to visit Vladivostock he could reach it within the fortnight, travelling the whole time in a drawing-room lighted by electricity. That is an astonishing change for Northern Asia, as great a change as the Americans effected when, driving a line through endless expanses of mountain, valley and desert, they brought San Francisco and the whole Western Pacific into connection with Washington and their great Atlantic cities. We doubt if that feat, which so greatly increased the European impression of American resources, displayed their skill and their quality of indomitableness more than this one

performed almost in silence by the Russians.

It is worth while to study for a moment the effects which this work, at least as great as the Suez Canal, must ultimately produce on European political relations. To begin with, it makes Asiatic Russia a division of the known world. We always think of that vast section of the earth's surface as if it were one expanse of ice-bound desert; but at least one-half of it, the entire South, in fact, with an area equal to more than half Russia, is a land of forest and broad valleys drained by great rivers, with the climate of Southern Russia, and almost its fertility. It will maintain, it is calculated, forty millions of people in comfort, and the people are only waiting to be maintained. For a century past the peasantry of Russia have been slowly slipping southward, where the "black land" will grow wheat, their rate of increase is greater than our own, and they are now so thick upon the ground that they gladly seize any opportunity of emigrating to lands not too unlike their own. The emigration to Siberia has already reached one hundred thousand a year, the Government grants thirty acres of land free to every applicant, with exemption from taxes for three years, and it is calculated that the moment the railway can carry them this rate will be more than doubled. Their seclusion from the external world in Siberia is no more to them than it is to peasants in Bengal or farmers in Iowa; they make a world of their own. As they emigrate by families, the rate of increase should be as rapid as that of Russia, so that by 1950 there may be twenty millions of sturdy peasants in Siberia who will not only cultivate the soil, but extract the minerals in which many of the more mountainous divisions of the country are singularly rich. They will add, as it were, a

whole nation to the strength of Russia, for they will not form a separate colony, but an addition to the present people, with the same laws, the same administrative system, and the same liability to conscription. It is as if Canada were added to Great Britain with no intervening sea, and waiting only for the engineer, the mining captain and cheap branch railways. Just imagine what our power would be in fifty years. The Russians seem to have no fear of separation, provided they can keep out the Chinese, who will be almost as much attracted to the region as their own people; and, indeed, modern experience seems to show in America, in Africa and in India that distances separate little compared with differences of race, and language, and civilization.

It follows almost of necessity that with this new population filling up, though thinly, all the intermediate spaces, and with the means of carriage as complete as if a mighty river stretched from Moscow to Newchwang, the weight of Russia in the Far East must be indefinitely increased. Journalists are accustomed to point out that the Trans-Asiatic Railway is only a single line, and cannot carry armies, but they overlook time in their calculations. If the army chiefs at St. Petersburg attempted to forward two hundred thousand men rapidly to the extreme East the line would undoubtedly break down; but they can slowly feed by its means a dozen camps, each the rallying ground of a corps d'armée, and slowly but steadily keep them fed. Russian soldiers pack close, they serve for twelve years, their chiefs have years before them, and they will act upon a definite plan directed to a single end-that of being strong where strength is required. When the branch railways are completed to Kirin and Newchwang, they will be able to march

a hundred thousand men, fully provided, to Pekin, and keep them provisioned and supplied with munitions for any needful time entirely independent of the sea. The journey will not have been from Moscow, but from camp to camp along the railway line. That, as it seems to us, will be the peculiarity of the Russian position. China can fight them if China is armed and organized, for China can waste soldiers as recklessly as they can; but if China remains, as Pushkin sang, “in dotage buried," the maritime peoples of Europe will be unable to help her. Nothing that they can do will alter the geographical facts or prevent Russia from becoming as regards Northern China the one predominant Power. They can no more defend Manchuria than the planet Mars, and if they still desire to be influential in China, they are mad in encouraging the Chinese Court to return to its Northern capital. Russia may be checked by want of pecuniary means, or by pressure upon her Western frontier, or by the destruction of her sea-borne trade, but upon the land frontiers of China she can be resisted by the Chinese alone. Assisted and officered by Japanese, they may be able to do it, but nobody else can; and if Siberia fills up as Russians expect, even China will be overtaxed. For ourselves, we view the prospect with equanimity, not seeing in the least why we should prefer Chinese to Russians, either as friends or as customers; but it is vain to hide from ourselves that a great shifting of power is taking place with the development and completion of the Siberian Railway. That marvellous shrinkage of the world which marked the latter half of the last century has extended itself to Northern Asia. The vast and impassable spaces which separate that great region from Europe have nearly disappeared, and we shall have to bear the

consequences of the new juxtaposition, as we should have if the English Channel were suddenly dried up. It would be ridiculous in the latter case to go about whining instead of organizing a conscription, and it is nearly as ridiculous to complain because when the EuThe Speaker.

ropean ministers differ at Peking, M. Lessar's representations are those which are weighed first. Li Hung Chang, though he may have been corrupt, knew his business and the real situation of his country in reference to Europe well enough.

Mr.

These are days in which words are being put to an infinite number of small and momentary uses, but are being poured into few great literary moulds. The wear and tear of the language is serious, and it behooves us to repair all ravages and errors with the diligence of spiders. Fortunately, there are willing minds for such work. Books having for their aim rectification of speech have been common of late years, and have rarely escaped attention. One such is before us. In "Word and Phrase: True and False Use in English" (McClurg, Chicago), Mr. Joseph Fitzgerald essays, not without ability, to set the scribbler right. Fitzgerald's formal qualifications are less important than those which declare themselves in his well-wrought pages, but he tells us that the words and misuses of words with which he deals suggested themselves to him "during the years that he was assistant editor of the 'North American Review' and 'Forum.'" Oddly enough, in stating this qualification, Mr. Fitzgerald himself falls-as we think-into verbal error, such error as any practised writer may not hope to avoid entirely. "The years that he was assistant editor." What of the "that" in this phrase? We do not think that it can be made to do duty for "when," "in which," or "during which." It is a small matter,

and we only mention it to show that in this department of sin, as in others more serious, the serpent is more subtile than any beast of the field. The best of us may fall, and we do.

For this very reason, and because our space suggests it, we shall confine ourselves to Mr. Fitzgerald's chapter on "Ignorantisms in Words and Phrases." By ignorantisms Mr. Fitzgerald means the solecisms of persons who are presumed to be educated, and not the vulgarisms of the uneducated. Surely the two designations might be interchanged with a gain rather than a loss of appropriateness. The mistakes which Mr. Fitzgerald proceeds to point out are of the nature of lapses, and seem more allied to vulgarisms than to ignorance. But there, Mr. Fitzgerald does excellent service, and we shall run through his more interesting criticisms with a light pen.

We are glad that he condemns the quite incorrect word caption, used, as it frequently is in American papers, in the sense of heading or title. A New York paper was good enough to congratulate us recently on an article in which it said the writer maintained the promise held out in his ingenious "caption." The word caption has nothing to do with caput or capitulum, but is a derivation of captio, meaning to seize. It carries a secondary meaning

of seizure by fraud or deceit, as when Lord Bacon wrote in the "Advancement of Learning:" "It is manifest that the use of this doctrine is for caption and contradiction." Yet in America they talk of the caption of Genesis I, or of an article under the caption of "A New Force in Politics." And dictionaries calmly record this meaning without protest. It cannot, however, be too clearly understood that a dictionary is no infallible court of appeal in such matters. Most dictionaries record all meanings as they find them, good and bad. Nor is a standard author the umpire in a question of the use or misuse of a word. The public mind is quite at sea in its methods of solving such doubts. A man has written a word or phrase of which the correctness is disputed. To defend himself he flies to the dictionary and shows you with triumph the definition he has adopted. You refuse the appeal, and he rushes to Shakespeare or Addison, and again returns in a triumphant, not to say scornful, mood. But his defence is not necessarily good, even now. The appeal to logic is higher, and even then there is the appeal to taste the taste not of past ages, but of the age we live in. We are no more to take a bad phrase from Shakespeare than we are to eat our food with our fingers, as probably Shakespeare did. His sanction for the misuse of a decent word is no more valid than his sanction for the correct use of an obscene word.

Taking Mr. Fitzgerald's little homilies as they come, we approve his remarks on the word tantalize, which does not mean, as many seem to think, to tease or worry in any and every way, but only by presenting something that is desired and then frustrating the attempt to possess it. The word is a crystallization of the story of Tantalus, who perished of hunger, with fruit hung just above him, and of

thirst, with water round his neck. The word is correctly used by Dryden in

Thy vain desires at strife Within themselves have tantaliz'd thy life.

And by Thackeray in "Vanity Fair:"

The major was going on in his tantalizing way, not proposing, and declining to fall in love.

The distinction between trivial and trifling is often lost. Trivial is an abstract quality. A book may be trivial, its sales trifling. The word fruition has for a long time been losing its special and delicate meaning by being employed to denote fruit, fruitage or the process of bearing fruit. "When the scheme comes to fruition" is a common phrase which ought not to pass. Mr. Plowden used the word rightly the other day when a man pleaded that he had got drunk because he had just obtained work which he was anxious to take up immediately. He had laid bricks, he said, since he was a child, and wished to go to work. Mr. Plowden humorously told him to go and lay bricks as fast as he could; he would not stand between him and the fruition of his dearest hopes. Here fruition means the enjoyment of fruit. In like manner Sir Thomas Browne wrote: "Let the fruition of things bless the possession of them." It is perhaps unnecessary to gird again at the use of the word phenomenon in the meaning of something remarkable. A phenomenon is simply an appearance, or a condition realized by the senses. Mr. Fitzgerald suggests the following explanation of the original perversion of this word.

One can hardly be in error in tracing the vulgar meaning of the word to the lecture hall in which the man of scfence, or the popularizer of scientific

knowledge, would

announce beforehand one of his ex riments by saying: "The phenomenon you are now to see," etc.; and as the ignorant audience would the next moment see some striking effects of mixture of chemicals, or some strange electrical action, they would naturally suppose that "phenomenon" meant "scientific miracle." Some good writers have employed the word in this vulgar sense; but that, fortunately, has not availed to consecrate the vulgar usage.

The word refer is being overworked, and in many cases should be relieved by words like mention, recite, tell or recount. Moreover, both refer and allude are frequently employed when the conditions under which they are admissible have been altogether overshot. Thus, if in a business letter or agreement a house or horse is fully described, and is the very subject of the agreement, it becomes wrong to speak of it in a final clause as the house or horse "here referred to," since this word is properly applicable only to something which has received no more than a passing or incidental mention.

Extra is an abused word. People say extra good or extra cheap in order to intensify good and cheap. But extra has no such force. So far from intensifying a given condition, it denies it by indicating that the thing so described lies outside the sphere or quality named. Thus, extra-judicial does not mean more than ordinarily judicial, as though a judge had dredged his conscience in giving an opinion, but outside of judicial, and therefore incapable of being judged at all in the prescribed way.

A grievous fault is the use of identity in a phrase like this: "He is identified with the anti-vaccination movement." A man can only identify himself with another man or set of men. He can identify himself with the opponents of vaccination, and even here the word carries a shade of meaning

of its own, distinguishing the phrase from such a one as "he joined the opponents of vaccination."

One should not speak of high or low calibre, but, remembering the meaning of calibre, one should apply to it only such adjectives as great or small.

It is wrong to speak of a consensus of opinion. The word consensus itself means an agreement of thought, and should stand alone.

Misconceived uses of the verb "to place" are many. It should usually be reserved for cases in which an actual enclosing and conditioning place is contemplated. You may place a bust in a niche, or your son in a school. But you should not "place" your hand on your heart, or even bait in a trap. The words put and set seem to be shunned as vulgar, but, as Mr. Fitzgerald says, this notion is held only by people who suspect the respectability of little and big, for which they must always use small and large.

To foreshadow is not the same as to predict. One event may foreshadow another, or one condition another, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer cannot foreshadow a surplus. The word exhaustive is certainly the "wild exaggeration" which Mr. Fitzgerald calls it. Journalists will even write that So-and-so has an exhaustive knowledge of China-a country of which no thorough knowledge exists in a Western mind. On the hysterical use of the word tremendous Mr. Fitzgerald is interesting. He traces it to the frequent chanting in old funeral services of the "Dies Iræ," with its Rex tremendæ majestatis. Consternation is often misapplied. When Queen Victoria died it was reported that consternation reigned in Vienna. There was no consternation even at Osborne.

We think that Mr. Fitzgerald goes too far when he objects to the word co-respondent on the ground that inasmuch as the paramour of a wife