externals that "Americans look upon the international yachting and other contests almost as though they were serious battles, and are elated or depressed accordingly; while the English take these matters much more calmly.' This is undoubtedly true as regards the outward show. But of the two the Americans are the better losers, inasmuch as they so soon dissipate outwardly the emotions of defeat. They may not be, conventionally, as good winners as the English, for the positives of victory affect them strongly and perhaps somewhat too obviously; but a straight defeat leaves them ultimately only healthily revengeful. And a healthy feeling of revenge is a wholesome stimulant. The English, on the contrary-the better class of English, that is to say: the representative class by which, in past times, we were wont to judge the country-the English, because they have in comparatively recent years been bred in the unctuous hypocrisy of sportsmanship, are easy and natural in their courteous acceptance of either defeat or victory.

But hypocrisy is not a virtue. It is only the disguise of vice. And a pose is only a pose-an attitude, if you will, representing not a moral attribute, but a conception of the social utility of the moral attribute it pretends to represent. It evidences no real change of heart. The English of today are those of one hundred years ago, so far as their essential selves are concerned; and no one who knows his England well needs to be told that the English of those days took their defeats with a very human ill-grace. They had not then learned to say, as Stevenson has said since, "Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fight in good spirits;" and until Anglo-Saxon characteristics become impotent, as a world force, in the emasculating refinements on the one hand and the devitalizing coarsenesses on the other of a too self-indulgent-civilization, the present-day English are not likely to embarrass a still flourishing business of succeeding, handed down to them by their forefathers as a main inheritance, by any ideals, the effect of which would be in the direction of equalizing the chances of their rivals.

Το

The business of the English, past, present and future, always has been, is, and always will be, to succeed. That, in a nutshell, is the secret of their marvellous success. show good spirits in defeat is a policy in furtherance of their chief concern-i. e.-the business of succeeding, not a sen

timent in modification of it. Nor could the fact well be otherwise. A country whose people truly accepted defeat as a sort of second-hand pleasure in victory-the reflected enjoyment of seeing someone else (and a rival) pleased-or whose outward show of "sportsmanship" correctly expressed the quality of their real feelings-a country of a character so amorphous would be on the high road to ruin. It is only those who are too spineless even to aspire to personal success who take defeat with the same inward good grace that the English have trained themselves to show outwardly as a matter of good form. The normal human being -the natural man-rebels in spirit, if not in overt act, against defeat in whatever guise it comes, not only because defeat is an offence to his vanity (a consideration of sufficient potency), but because of a remnant of instinct surviving in him from those far-off days when to suffer defeat was likely to be distinctly unhealthy.

Defeat and death were terms which the early Briton (had he known the words, as well as the conditions which the words represented) would have been likely to connect in his mind. The two concomitants, as they then weredefeat and death, had an unpleasant habit of coming together with a suddenness which eliminated the element of personal humiliation from the loser-side of the situation in exactly the same proportion that it heightened the effect of the example. Hence the English, who are the most conservative of the highly civilized peoples of the world, and therefore the most retentive of those primitive instincts which originated in painful experience and grew strong in the perilous acquirements of it-the English, we may logically assume, would be the race which more than any other would be most likely to conserve the vital objection of the stone-age man to defeat in any form; the assumption having, as a qualifying or dissembling correlative, the no less logical presumption that they would be led by their civilization to camouflage the crudeness of their primal impulse with some of the artificial conventions of their ancient society. Defeat having ceased to have, for them, a fatal significance as its normal characteristic, and the original instinctive objection to it being of a somewhat rude expression, they gradually built up around the offending natural instinct, whose unrefinement shocked their cultivated taste, a sort of wall or pretence of well-bred

ignorance of its existence, which had the double effect of screening an unsightly feature while protecting and perpetuating its existence.

That the instinct survives-that it retains practically all of its inherent primal force and vitality as a racial factor, albeit the want of perfect freedom of action may have made it a little flabby-is, I believe, easy to prove. But the proof must be sought not in direct examples, which are not often forthcoming, but in indirect and, apparently, uncorrelated incidents, which, like the widely separated vents of some gigantic subterranean cauldron, serve to relieve the central source of heat and pressure. These incidents, though numerous, do not, as the French say, spring to the eye, their real significance and application being generally so obscured or overshadowed by the popular appeal of the larger interest or issue with which they are associated, that, except to the discerning few, they appear to be emotional safety-valves of whatever source of public feeling they seem to be relieving, rather than outlets for the evacuation of bad humours from many a festering sore of wounded vanity.

It would, however, be invidious to specify these incidents here. To think that ill-will arises directly from the nature of the occasion is always a pleasanter and more beneficial personal and social moral influence than to know that it had its origin in some indirect and possibly remote defeat, the circumstances and character of which may or may not have been worthy of the maturing crop of consequences. It is, for instance, more flattering to the corporate-the national -vanity of the English for them to imagine that their resentment of an obnoxious or irritating situation (momentous or trivial, as the case may be) occurring between themselves and another people, arises, as a pure and simple product of direct injury or offence, primarily and solely out of the inherent defects and injustices of the situation itself, rather than in part and inceptively from some hidden festering sore, which marks the spot where a searching defeat, or series of defeats, long past, perhaps, and by the world forgot, still rankles in their inner consciousness. Yet it would not be difficult for anyone familiar with the mentality and psychology of the English to trace much of the animus of the national popular ego in many an affair of grave international importance to some essentially inconse

quential defeat, not in the game, but in the games of life.

And it is well for the English that this is so-that they are not good losers. No friend of the race would have it otherwise. The simple and logical fact that to lose is still a greater shock to their pride than it is to a people more accustomed to losing, is one of the most hopeful signs among the various portents of Anglo-Saxon decadence. So long as a people resent defeat with a wholesome and natural heartiness, so long is the primal force in them the basis and support of the national character. Veneer it as you will, the rough, tough, sturdy grain is there to strengthen and sustain the softer qualities. It is when defeat is accepted with inward grace, as beautiful as it is waxen, that a once virile people begin to fall to pieces. The only thing that has saved and will continue to save the English from a fifth-rate place in the world is the fact that they are not good losers. May they never be that!

LINCOLN WILBAR.

THE MADNESS OF MAN

BY ALICE BROWN

WHEN it comes to grips with disease, the enemy of the flesh, human kind knows what to do. It puts itself in the hands of science, praying, with the fervor of the terrified atom, to be delivered, at all costs, from the "body of this death." Tuberculosis has been all but crowded inside those doors before which Mytyl and Tyltyl paused on their progress of wonder,-incarcerated ignominiously with Cold-inthe-Head. Another decade and cancer will be bundled after it. And yet, though we are taking thought of the body, we show no smallest sign of recognizing any urgent need of fighting the madness of our collective mind. For mankind is mad, never more so than in this present reaction from great imperative issues that would not be denied. It has (( eaten of the insane root." "The world is a more or less simpering Bedlam broken loose, and America, our intermittently recreant and always our beloved, is possibly, after Russia, the most irresponsible lunatic at large. Inevitably tired of war, she blots out the past six years' obsession by staring unwinkingly at one small figure held very near the eyes: Peace, sprucely equipped with olive branch and dove. Remind her of the present confusion of conflict in the Eastern world and she virtually, out of an optimism attendant on the full dinner-pail of one capacity or another, repudiates it as a disturbance that can in any sense afflict the actuality of the goddess before her myopic gaze. And this dogged equanimity of hers affects work and play alike in every quarter connected with the business of life. The editor and the theatrical manager even, those "abstract and brief chronicles" of public opinion, issue the edict that literature and the stage, if they expect to be supported, must now ignore this biggest drama the world has seen since the Crucifixion.