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anti-Muscovite than anti-British. For English readers his sympathetic sketch of his intercourse with Lord Kitchener is among the best things in a book all compact of force and color. It is like a film of the deserts of Asia in their terror and of its mountains in their ruthless sublimity. The author's own sketches and maps are so profuse and good as almost to double the effect of his energetic pages.

The Worship of Nature, b Sir James George Frazer, O. M. Vol. I. London and New York: The Macmillan Company.

[Manchester Guardian]

SIR JAMES FRAZER'S Gifford Lectures will take a high place among contributions to the study of natural theology by lecturers on that foundation. In a masterly introductory, chapter he demon། strates the conformity of the study of primitive religion, or, as he calls it in a happy phrase, the embryology of natural religion, to the general scheme of knowledge. He argues that both the materialist conception of the universe of modern science and the spiritualist conception are at one in seeking for an ultimate unity. The same gradual process of simplification and unification that is to be seen in science marks the history of religion from animism through polytheism to monotheism. The statement of his broad philosophical position is timely in the interests of a study of which the ultimate issues seem at present to be in some danger of neglect.

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Natural theology among primitive peoples and the peoples of the early civilizations falls, in the author's view, into two divisions. On one hand is the worship of nature, on the other the worship of the dead. By the worship of nature he understands the worship of natural phenomena conceived as endowed with the will and power to benefit or injure mankind. This is in full accord with the familiar animistic beliefs of primitive man. In the case of the higher forms of religion it is largely a matter of inference and interpretation.

In this first volume of his lectures Sir James Frazer passes under review the evidence relating to the worship of the sky, the earth, and the sun. Of those sections that deal with primitive peoples the most interesting and perhaps most important is that which discusses sky-worship in Africa. The conception of a supreme deity - a sky god -in Africa has sometimes been attributed to Christian influence; but the uniform character of the belief and its wide distribution, as demonstrated in this survey, would alone weigh against that view, apart from other considerations that are here fully set forth.

David, by D. H. Lawrence. London: Martin Secker. 158.

[Observer]

In this play on Saul and the young David - - it ends with Jonathan's warning and David's flight

Mr. Lawrence has controlled and disciplined his style and his thought. If he has not added to the beauty of one of the world's greatest stories, he had given it a setting, an imaginative framework, which is worthy of the supreme original. He has avoided all artifices of the embellisher; and while his play is in prose, the prose is the prose of a poet, nervous, energetic, and unencumbered. The main character in the piece is Saul, whom we see at the beginning proud of his victory over the Amalekite, carelessly granting Agag an ignominious mercy. The theme of this play is the fall of Saul from the favor of the Lord and his supplanting by young David. Mr. Lawrence follows the Biblical narrative very closely, and is extremely successful in his use of the recorded speeches of his characters. His Samuel is grim, a driven force; his Saul bewildered, not understanding the powers that make and unmake him; his Jonathan, a gentle, disturbed youth, and David a boy conscious, yet not fully aware, of his great destiny. He is a boy who does not fear to go on in the dark, because he knows that the Spirit that instructs and orders him is greater than the irony of fate or the obstinacy of facts. The other people in the play have hopes and fears, ambitions, selfishnesses, and desires; but Samuel and David believe in the guidance of a star.

Mr. Lawrence is, perhaps, least successful in his treatment of the friendship between David and Jonathan. David should be simpler in his expression of love; and though in one passage Mr. Lawrence makes him philosophize beautifully, his speeches are rather out of keeping with his character. The character of Saul is finely presented, and his speeches have a noble rhetoric, as in the complaint when he is listening to David..

...

We hope this one volume will not exhaust Mr. Lawrence's interest in the story; it would make an admirable prelude to one or two more plays on the life of King David.

BOOKS MENTIONED

AUSTIN, BERTRAM, and LLOYD, W. FRANCIS. The Secret of High Wages. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1926. $1.25.

The Plough and the Stars, by Sean O'Casey.

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926. $1.50.

In one sense at least this third play of Mr. O'Casey's deserves the epithet 'Shakespearean' that has been conferred upon it: like the Shakespeare of the chronicle plays, Mr. O'Casey is concerned not with telling a ‘dramatic' story in the ordinary sense in which a strongly climactic series of related incidents is intended but with passing before us a series of more or less disconnected episodes in a period pregnant with historical meaning. Even less than Shakespeare does the Irish playwright undertake to represent events of impressive and imposing significance; indeed, he seems to reckon for his peculiar type of dramatic effect on the halftragic, half-farcical triviality and inconsequence of the events he utilizes. It is a 'backstairs' view, almost literally, that we get of the incidents of Easter Week in Dublin in 1916, and if it were not for the vigor with which Mr. O'Casey apprehends personality, and the curiously poetical realism with which he writes dialogue, The Plough and the Stars would seem scarcely to have a reason for being. As it is, one cannot read the play without being half-reluctantly engaged by the rank popular conversation of these tenement Dubliners, by the unemphatic humor of the barroom and looting scenes, and by the grim but credible tragedy of the last act where O'Casey seems almost to have Shakespeare's 'told by an idiot' in mind. In a season of clever and empty plays this seems like a genuinely literary event.

The Question Mark, by M. Jaeger. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926. $2.00.

ANY author who writes a book about the future has the critic at an unfair advantage. One never quite likes to say that the book is absurd, because future generations may justify the author. But in spite of all scruples, let us hasten to say that The Question Mark is at least fantastic. Miss Jaeger catapults her feeble little hero into the twenty-second century, where he spends a large part of the reader's time flying about in a tiny airplane. The picture the author draws of the socialistic state in which he finds himself deserves, along with the rest of the book, to go down in the voluminous annals of insignificant absurdity. It might be a trifle unfair to say that

Miss Jaeger is no more of an artist than the author of The Girl Aviators in Their Phantom Airship, but one can say with perfect justice that she is not able to claim even the somewhat fre quent and dubious praise of being one of the most promising young Englishwomen of letters.

Odtaa, by John Masefield. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926. $2.50.

MR. MASEFIELD's latest novel transports the reader, as did Anthoy Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda, into a fictitious country where incredibly complicated politics and geography are the order of the day along with passionate loves and hatreds. We follow the breathlessly thrilling story of a young Englishman who loses his way in the heart of a South American forest in an attempt to save the life of the beautiful Spanish Carlotta. Though there are many passages in the book thrilling enough to make the hair rise in excitement and suspense on the hard head of the most phlegmatic reader, usually immune to thrills, the poor construction of the novel does much to counteract its merits. A good adventure story should not have to rely on 'Appendices and Notes' to explain the baffling points of its plot. Why did not Mr. Masefield, a master of narrative verse, confine himself to the medium in which he has attained distinction, instead of producing an adventure story that falls short of the author's highest capabilities?

of

English Poems, by Edmund Blunden. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. $2.50. MR. BLUNDEN who won the Hawthornden Prize a few years ago with his volume, The Shepherd is a poet in the pastoral tradition, and it is an open question whether a modern poet, no matter how personal his note, can write in that tradition without getting disastrously out of key with the major mood of his time. Too many the poems in this book seem at first glance to have been turned up in the work of some eighteenth or early-nineteenth century lyrist; yet on a closer reading one sees that for all their superficial appearance of archaism they are poems that could have been written only by a sensitive citizen of the twentieth century, and this overtone of something more complex, if it keeps them from being 'perfect' on their own terms, makes it easier for a contemporary to read them with satisfaction.

DEBT SETTLEMENTS

ITALY is jubilant over the ratification of her debt pact with Washington, while France is depressed rather than elated at the signing of her debt accord with us. Italy's official press interpreted the Senate's ratification as a Fascist victory over intriguing Freemasons, conspiring Socialists, and other enemies of Mussolini in America. France faces the prospect of remaining a debtor of the two great Anglo-Saxon Powers to the average amount of well toward two hundred million dollars annually for more than half a century with anything but rosy anticipations. Le Figaro summarized the advantages of the accord as, first, a reduction in the sum total of payments, and, second, the incorporation of the commercial debt in the general settlement. Its disadvantages are that there is no safeguarding clause and no written engagement relieving France in case of Germany's default, and the fact that the reduction in total amount is considerably less than was granted Italy. Senator Debierre impressed upon his countrymen in L'Ere Nouvelle that

every move that France makes toward substituting certainty for uncertainty in her financial affairs is a step toward stability and strengthened solvency, and in the long run toward assured national prosperity. That apparently is the chief consolation that the country draws from the settlement.

How nervous the public mind abroad has become under the obsession of these obligations to America is indicated by the sensational rumors that find credence there regarding our intentions concerning them. Shortly before the agreement was signed in Washington a report was current on the boulevards to the effect that President Coolidge proposed to insist upon America's right to 'control' French finances, which suggests putting Paris in the same category with Peking. In Brussels, Wall Street rather than Washington is feared as a financial master. Pertinax, the peppery leader-writer of L'Écho de Paris, has this to say upon that subject:

and made her cut down her allotments for national defense. Then he discovered that certain administrative expenses were not figured in the railway budget, but had been shifted to the general budget of the Government. In order to assure himself that the roads would be run on a strictly sound business basis, so as to be safe security for the loan, he demanded that they be placed under an international board of control and that the English General Manse should be appointed to manage them. When the Cabinet at Brussels objected, he modified his demands and asked for gilt-edged securities to guarantee his advances; and not trusting those of Belgium itself, he asked for four hundred million francs of the stocks and bonds of the Société Générale de Belgique which operates the rich mines of Katanga in the Congo. We know what to expect in connection with private advances (from America) by the recent proposal of the Foundation Company. M. Doumer, before leaving the Ministry of Finance, rejected the offer of a loan, which was to be secured by a mortgage on certain property belonging to the Government, including the buildings occupied by the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of the Interior, the Navy Office, and other struc

tion, for the Civil Service to get out of hand and become more or less of an economic incubus. A hundred very necessary things that the nation wanted and that required money had to be done, and it was very natural that politicians should embark the State upon new enterprises and take a chance of getting money later to finance them. But the inevitable result of all this has been inflation. To be sure, stern measures were taken to check this evil. A new currency was introduced and was kept for a time at par. But this rehabilitation resulted in a shrinkage of liquid capital and a business crisis which the country did not have resources to tide over. Moreover, the Government's deficits continued. When the Cabinet tried to cut down the railway staff, for example, to the number that was properly required to operate the trains, the politicians put in a veto. And this went on throughout the public services. Land reforms, urgently demanded by and long since promised to the peasants, were deferred and again deferred. Finally, the economy programme began to touch the military establishment and was resisted there. Meanwhile personal factors aggravated the situation.

The latter have culminated in an army quarrel of far-reaching political implications. Before the war, many Polish officers held high rank in the Austrian service, and on account of this advantage became the West Pointers of the new army organized when their country became independent. Marshal Pilsudski and his Legionaries, on the other hand, were irregulars, or militiamen, and the Marshal, despite his high post, never received military training in the army of a Great Power. The two cliques have naturally fallen apart. Not long ago General Szeptcki, Chief of the Army Inspectorate at Krakow, was compelled

Pilsudski, who had been living in quasi-retirement until his recent sensational reappearance upon the political stage, has been freely mentioned for some time as the candidate for a sort of Mussolini dictatorship. But like Mussolini, his ambitions in this direction have been hampered somewhat by his old record as a Democrat and a Socialist. It simply confuses the situation, however, to attempt to identify the Pilsudski movement with Fascism, and to draw an artificial parallel between that leader and Mussolini. The common soldiers and officers of lower rank are said to be Pilsudski's devoted followers, but the General Staff and the higher officers are intensely hostile to him. How much this military discord has had to do with precipitating the present difficulty it is impossible at the moment to say. More or less Monarchist agitation has existed in Poland for some time. But whatever the outcome of the crisis or the true issues that it involves, the precedent of armed revolt, or the seizure of power by military means, is exceedingly ominous for the young republic.

FOR KING AND COUNTRY' UNDER this title the Daily Mail published in its European edition of May 3 the strike leader that precipitated the break between Labor and the British

Government, when that journal's printers refused to get out the London issue ⚫ containing it. The text of this strikingly unincendiary appeal is as follows:

The miners after weeks of negotiation

have declined the proposals made to them, and the coal mines of Britain are idle.

The Council of the Trades-Union Congress, which represents all the other tradeunions, has determined to support the miners by going to the extreme of ordering a general strike.

This determination alters the whole position. The coal industry, which might have been reorganized with good-will on both sides, seeing that some 'give and take' is plainly needed to restore it to prosperity, has now become the subject of a great political struggle, which the nation has no choice but to face with the utmost coolness and the utmost firmness.

We do not wish to say anything hard about the miners themselves. As to their

leaders, all we need say at this moment is that some of them are and have openly declared themselves under the influence of people who mean no good to Great Britain.

A general strike is not an industrial dispute. It is a revolutionary movement intended to inflict suffering upon the great mass of innocent persons in the community the Government. and thereby to put forcible constraint upon

It is a movement which can only succeed by destroying the Government and subverting the rights and liberties of the people.

This being the case, it cannot be tolerated by any civilized Government, and it must be dealt with by every resource at the disposal of the community.

A state of emergency and national danger has been proclaimed to resist the attack. We call upon all law-abiding men and women to hold themselves at the service of King and country.

A WORD FOR THE RIFFI

ALEXANDER LANGLET, of the Stockholm Tidningen, has contributed to the Spectator, under the title 'A War without Doctors,' an account of medical conditions as he saw them in the Rif. Before leaving for a trip to that country, he inquired through the Swedish Red Cross whether it proposed to assist