evenings my thoughts drifted back to some farms in my home land of Flanders, where I was quartered during the war, and I asked myself what effect it would have upon our Peasant Union if our villages could each send a delegate to spend a short time among the farmers of Yakima, and learn what organization and education can accomplish.

This is a country which demonstrates that it is not misery which creates the most vigorous class consciousness, and that a régime of capitalist exploitation is most menaced where the common people have attained the highest degree of material well-being and education, as they have in the American Far West. All this country is just now the scene of a great revival of class consciousness, both among the country population and among the working men of the cities. It is a surprising phenomenon, especially for a period immediately following a war. Its most characteristic expression is in the alliance of the trade unions and farmers' organizations to support an outspoken collectivist programme. This movement has already

revolutionized the political situation in a group of states, including North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Idaho, Nebraska, Colorado, Montana, Oregon, and Washington, extending from the Great Lakes to the Pacific ocean. It has not yet gained a wide foothold in the East and South, but is extending rapidly in those directions. Even at the present moment it profoundly influences the general policy of the country, and it is the great new fact which disturbs the slumbers of old party politicians and threatens their monopoly of power.

During the last two months I have been studying the growth of this movement and the conditions to which it owes its birth. I am convinced that it is destined to have a marked effect upon the history of both the United States and Canada. I even venture the prediction that it will revolutionize the social constitution of all the English-speaking territories of the new New World, and lead them by paths perhaps distinct from those followed by European Socialism, but no less certain and direct, toward an eventual coöperative republic of producers.

VOL. 19-NO. 983

OBERAMMERGAU has fallen on evil times, and there is more than a possibility that the drama of the Passion as presented under ecclesiastical auspices at Nancy in Lorraine will take its place. Mr. Somerset Maugham, author of the diverting Too Many Husbands or England, Home and Beauty, has a new play on the boards, The Unknown, a review of which follows.

Mrs. Asquith's fashionable and cheeky 'reminiscences' have proved a boon to the press, and painters, photographers, publicists, and skin-food specialists have been employed to deny her denial of beauty to the daughters of the twentieth century. 'Autolycus,' of the Athenæum thus comments on the Victorian type:

'Between the 'thirties and 'fifties another type, the egg-faced girl, reigned supreme in the affections of the world. From the early portraits of Queen Victoria to the fashion-plates in the Ladies' Keepsake this invariable type prevails the egg-shaped face, the sleek hair, the swan-like neck, the round, champagne-bottle shoulders. Compared with the decorous impassivity of the oviform girl our flat-faced fashion-plates are terribly abandoned and provocative. And because one expects so much in the way of respectability from these egg-faces of an earlier age, one is apt to be shocked when one sees them conducting themselves in ways that seem unbefitting. One thinks of that enchanting picture of Etty's 'Youth on the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm.' The naiads are of the purest egg-faced type. Their

hair is sleek, their shoulders slope and their faces are as impassive as blanks. And yet they have no clothes on. It is almost indecent; one imagined that the egg-faced type came into the world complete with flowing draperies.

'It is not only the face of beauty that alters with the changes of popular taste. The champagne-bottle shoulders of the oviform girl have vanished from the modern fashion-plate and from modern life. The contemporary hand, with its two middle fingers held together and the forefinger and little finger splayed apart, is another recent product. Above all the feet have changed. In the days of the egg-faces no fashion-plate has more than one foot. This rule will, I think, be found invariable. That solitary foot projects, generally in a strangely haphazard way as though it had nothing to do with a leg, from under the edge of the skirt. And what a foot! It has no relation to those provocative feet in Suckling's ballad:

Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice ran in and out.

It is an austere foot. It is a small, black, oblong object like a tea-leaf. No living human being has ever seen a foot like it, for it is utterly unlike the feet of 1920. To-day the fashion-plate is always a biped. The tea-leaf has been replaced by two feet of rich baroque design, curved and florid, with insteps like the necks of Arab horses. Faces may have changed shape, but feet have altered far more radically. On the text, 'the feet of the young women,' it would

WHEN Mrs. Asquith asked the famous Dr. Jowett about the nature of his lady love, Jowett answered 'Violent, very violent.' The lady of violence is now said to have been

have accepted it all as a sincere attempt to preserve their genius for future generations by a different method of interpretation. They would not recognize the Wuthering Heights and the Thrushcross Grange of the film, because the originals are in ruins, but they would realize how much the producer must have been helped in his work by those who keep the Brontë memory greeen.

a century by two powerful advocates. Socrates and Xantippe would have been child's play to such a union.

THE first play in which Lionel Barrymore will appear during the coming season will be a dramatization of Blasco Ibanez's Blood and Sand in which he will take the part of the famous toreador. It will be in four acts and five scenes and will bring upon the stage practically all the many characters in the novel. The production will probably be ready in December.

WHEN at a French University some years ago, I was approached by a native student of English literature, and solemnly assured that the greatest, incomparably the greatest novel in our language was Voodringats.

'Voodringats,' thought I-what on earth can it be? I should have been puzzled still, had not the phrase Les Sœurs Brontë crept into the conversation, and given me the clue to Wuthering Heights. It is to me a quite unreadable novel, an affair of tragic puppets. It has been recently filmed. The Times remarks:

"Thus, for Wuthering Heights the Old Hall at Haworth was placed at his disposal, while for Thrushcross Grange he obtained permission to use Kildwick Hall. And in addition, he had at his command the moors, the stone

Brontë knew and of which she wrote, and the result is a series of natural settings which it would be difficult to improve on. The atmosphere, too, seems to have entered into the players, for Mr. Milton Rosmer's performance as Heathcliff is a really remarkable piece of work. His acting is consistently good, but there is one moment, when he at length accomplishes his revenge, wins Wuthering Heights from Hindley Earnshaw at the gambling table and then drives him out to the menial position which he had himself occupiedwhen it reached an unusually high level. The closing scenes, in which Heathcliff's mad hatred gradually dies down as he feels that Cathy is waiting for him in the Beyond are also beautifully played by Mr. Rosmer. Wuthering Heights is not merely a good film but it is a faithful reproduction of the original.'

L'OPINION is possibly ironic in saying: "The American Boy Scouts have come to France to visit our Battlefields. Certain children in the United States receive the most methodical education

The village of Stour, in Kent, had an energetic young vicar, who was prevented from going to the war and who was also made pathetically 'interesting' by a slightly diseased lung. The Church Militant was, in the Reverend Norman Poole, almost the Church Pugnacious. That the simple, hearty fellow always said 'our brave lads at the front' when he meant soldiers we took for granted; but he was exceptional in the fervor with which, in season and out of season, he attacked the religious beliefs of his parishioners, should they not happen to agree precisely with his own.

It must be admitted that the gentlefolk of Stour gave every excuse to their vicar and to his tactless, good-hearted wife. They seemed to like talking about their faith and their souls and the most sacred mysteries of their religion in the drawing room over the tea-cups. There was old Colonel Wharton, a Christian of the true soldierly type, 'an honest, upright, God-fearing gentleman.' There was his wife, a lady of the fluffy, soulful kind, who maundered in sing-song about the 'dear Vicar,' and tried to behave as if she was n't a thoroughly practical and useful woman. There was Miss Sylvia Bullough, a devoted sister in the Church. With all these, of course, the Reverend Norman Poole was perfectly safe. And his safety encouraged him to attack not, indeed, wary old Dr. Macfarlane, who was a deeply religious man, though he had

shirked church for 25 years, but two other 'brands,' which might be plucked from the burning.

One of these brands scorched his fingers badly. Mrs. Littlewood, a widow, came back from the death-bed of her last surviving son in France to tell the people of Stour how much she had enjoyed the music halls in London, and how pleasantly she looked forward to giving parties in her great and now empty house. And when they began 'going on at her' about her heartlessness and want of faith, she said she would rather play picquet with old Colonel Wharton than discuss her love and her religion. And when still they went on at her she sprang up suddenly from the card table with a thrilling cry: 'And who will forgive God?'

That, of course, was FitzGerald's Omar put into Mr. Maugham's prose:

'For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is blackened, Man's forgiveness give- and take!'

But Mrs. Littlewood spoke it with all the force of her being; and later, when she 'went on' a bit on her own account at the Vicar and his supporters, she gave us the most dramatic and exciting moment in the whole play.

Mrs. Littlewood was acted by Miss Haidée Wright. You can imagine the shock of that sudden outcry, the intensity of passion with which her tale of misery and brave despair came hissing through her all but clenched teeth. And at the close of that act the audience would not be satisfied until they had Miss Wright before the curtain and thundered their applause at her.

The other brand was Colonel Wharton's son, young Major Wharton, home on a few days' leave from the war and on the eve of marriage to Miss Sylvia Bullough. This part of the story is less clean-cut than the episode of Mrs. Wharton, less susceptible of thrilling dramatic treatment. Major Whar

ton is not by any means an atheist, as the vicar calls him; but after a year or two of real war he cannot any longer acquiesce in the doctrines of the Reverend Norman Poole. And though he will go to church, to please his people, he will not take the Holy Communion. The vicar talks and talks; his wife chips in with a rough hand. Mrs. Wharton coos and bridles; the Colonel blusters a little. The unhappy youth is forced to discuss in public subjects which he prefers to keep to himself. None can make him give way. Then Sylvia tries her hand. First, she declares that she will not marry him. Then, intoxicated with the luxury of woe, she plays upon him as dirty a trick as can be imagined. She cheats him into taking the Holy Communion. When he comes back from acting the lie to find that he has been meanly tricked, Sylvia hugs his cold rage and his hot shame to her bosom with glee. She has now a glut of misery. She has sacrificed everything, including her own honor and her lover's, to her ideal, and henceforth she can live in radiant and unrelieved woe.

Well, there are people like Sylvia Bullough; but they are unpleasant company. And there are people like the Reverend Norman Poole, but we are glad to get away from them in the drawing room. To set against these worthy but tiresome people, Mr. Maugham can give us no one but young Wharton; and he, good fellow though he was, did not take us very far, either in sentimental or in intellectual interest. There was no one in the play (not even old Dr. Macfarlane, with his Wellsian deity) who could be said to have 'come through'- no one, though the play is strongly anti-clerical, who could give us a view of life to set against that of the clerical party. To anyone who has read and thought at all seriously about these things, most

of the argument to and fro must seem a little shallow; to all who have not, it must seem more than a little dull and lacking in drama. Yet so devoid are most plays of anything like thought that Mr. Maugham's new play seemed at moments extraordinarily interesting; and we would gladly have sat out a far duller play for the sake of that outburst of Miss Haidée Wright.

Lady Tree was all herself as Mrs. Wharton. Miss Ellen O'Malley played Sylvia Bullough with fine conviction. Mr. Hignett did wonders of tact in the part of the Vicar, and Mr. Charles V.

The Two Egg Collectors

FROM recently republished juvenili a of Maurice Baring comes this 'Fable for Immoral Children.'

Once upon a time at a private school there were two boys called Anderson and Pearse, who collected eggs. Pearse had much the best collection, because he used to make splendid bargains at 'swopping,' and was not in the least ashamed of buying eggs; it was also suspected that he stole some; but he was much too sharp to be found out. Anderson, on the other hand, never bought; and his eggs were all 'endblown.' It happened that one day a gentleman came down to see over the school, and being himself an ardent egg-collector, asked the boys to show him their collections. He was quite delighted with Pearse's collection; and said it was much the best, whereas he only laughed at Anderson's endblown specimens. 'But,' said Anderson, 'Pearse buys his eggs. And he's stolen some; he says so himself.'

'Ah!' answered the gentleman, he is a collector, you see.' Two days afterward Pearse received a mysterious parcel, and inside it was the light green, red-spotted egg of the swallow-tailed kite, a very rare egg, which the boys used to talk about with bated breath.