covers one leaves the others open. It is quite possible that all three may be used simultaneously by the Russians, who may strive to gain Vladivostock in detachments. All three routes are open all the year. There is only one course which gives a reasonable probability of destroying the Russians, and this is for Admiral Togo to move his whole force to the neighborhood of Vladivostock, temporarily abandoning Dalny, Port Arthur and the Tsushima Straits, and watching the three lines of approach with cruisers, which will communicate news to him by wireless telegraphy. It involves the establishment of a fresh Japanese naval base far up the east coast of Korea, connected by telegraph with Gensan and Seoul, and there is but little time left for such an operation. The above plan has the great strategic virtue of concentration, enabling Admiral Togo to bring his whole force to bear on the approaching Russians.

If Port Arthur still shelters an intact fleet, the Japanese position will be serious, since the Baltic Fleet, may move either to Port Arthur or to Vladivostock, and in either case the Russian navy will be able to direct a terrible attack on the communications of the Japanese army. It is one of the first maxims of war that an army cannot keep the field with its communications in daily peril.

These are possibilities which must be kept in view in England when judging the situation. As the allies of Japan, we may hope for the early fall of Port Arthur, but it must not be forgotten that up to the present the Japanese have not been able to bring a direct fire to bear upon the Russian battle-squadron in Port Arthur harbor, and that to effect this they must take Erhlung and others of the inner forts. The Russian resistance is being prolonged by British subjects, who are running ammunition and food into the

harbor, making thereby immense profits at the cost of national interests, and there is some evidence to show that the garrison's supplies have not seriously diminished since August last. The maintenance of a close blockade is a matter of immense difficulty where the fortifications are equipped with long-range guns; warships must keep two or three miles out, and this gives favorable openings for blockade-run. ners on dark nights. The activity of blockade-runners is the sole explanation of the protracted resistance offered by the garrison, and has cost the lives of thousands of Japanese soldiers. Those "masses of flesh" torn to pieces by the Russian guns before the earthworks of the Russian fortress are in part the handiwork of British speculators, and it would be well for this nation to lay the fact to heart when its statesmen are expatiating upon the horrors of war.

Thus it cannot be assumed with any certainty that Port Arthur will fall within the next few weeks, or even that the Russian ships will be destroyed. Those of us who believe that the government of this world is just and moral will hope that the magnificent devotion and heroism of the Japanese may be crowned with success, but the material obstacles which the spiritual force has to overcome are prodigious. The Japanese have no time to spare, as their ships will need to be docked and refitted if they are to meet the Russians in the highest state of efficiency, and the refit of nine or ten units will require some weeks.

But here it may be objected that the Baltic Fleet will never arrive. Yet, on thinking out the difficulty of the voyage, it will be found that everything depends upon whether neutrals are ready to enforce their neutrality, "even at the cost of war." If not, the Russian fleet can reach the Far East with little trouble and delay. But can

we reasonably expect States such as Spain, Portugal and Holland to incur the certainty of Russian hostility when they see that England, the greatest naval Power, is unwilling to enforce what she knows to be right, because a "war with a first-class Power" is a terrible affair, involving immense sacrifice of life and treasure? I do not think we can reasonably expect it, and if so, there is nothing to prevent the Russians from coaling at one neutral port after another, each time of different nationality, and so by easy stages reaching the Far East. The real difficulty will be experienced in the Indian Ocean, where there is a lap of 3100 miles from Bourbon to Batavia to be bridged. Even this may be crossed if the Russians use the British islets of the Chagos Archipelago, or if they can coal at sea. In the British manoeuvres of 1890 six ships of Sir M. Seymour's fleet shipped in less than two days 1226 tons of coal upon the open waters of the North Atlantic, so that coaling at sea must not be dismissed as impossible.

The rendezvous will probably be off the Chagos or at Minicoy, where the detachments moving viâ the Suez Canal and via the Cape will meet. The Cape detachment, consisting of the five big battleships and most of the cruisers, left Tangier on November 5, and proceeding by Dakar, Kamarun, Gaboon, and the Cape to Bourbon and Chagos, has a voyage of 9010 miles before it can reach the rendezvous. Allowing an average speed of 200 miles per day, which was about the record from the Great Belt to Tangier, fortyfive days would be required, but as some of the ships will have to coal five or six times, and the battleships

Egypt, in fact, is opening the door to the Baltic Fleet by allowing it to receive at Port Said as much coal and provisions as may be required to take it to the next port and by guarding the Suez Canal. The breach of neu

three or four times, and as possible breakdowns have to be allowed for, sixty days would seem about the time needed. That is to say, the fleet should be at the Chagos, concentrated, about January 4; or, if a speed of twelve knots can be managed, and if the coaling is expeditiously accomplished, three weeks earlier (about December 14 or 15). From the Chagos Islands eastwards the distances are to Batavia, 2090 miles; Batavia to Saigon or the neighborhood, 1100; Saigon to the Izu Islets off the east coast of Japan, 2400 miles; and from the Izu Isles to Vladivostock by the Tsugaru Straits, about 1000 miles. The last portion of the voyage, where the danger will be greatest, will therefore be 6600 miles, which could be covered in forty days, allowing for slow movements, so as to keep the fleet as far as possible coaled and ready to act. Or if a speed of twelve knots can be maintained, and the coaling is rapid, this last period may be shortened to twenty-six or twentyseven days. The fleet may then be expected at Vladivostock between January 10 and mid-February. If it took the shortest route and steamed straight for Port Arthur, as it might, were the Russian ships there known to be intact, it could be off that port by January 4. That is the earliest possible date at which it can arrive.

Having no bases of their own available in the Far East, the Russians will probably endeavor, when they come within the zone of Japanese operations, to create flying bases among the numerous islands in the Malay Archipelago which are not connected by cable with the outer world, and which possess good harbors. There are several such, some of them almost unknown

trality on Egypt's (and England's) part is all the more inexplicable, as in 1898 Egypt declined to allow Camaras' fleet to ship a single ton of fuel within Egyptian waters. But Spain was only a second-class Power.

to, and scarcely ever visited by white men. The whole Archipelago nominally belongs to a weak neutral, Holland, so that it will be exceedingly difficult to prevent the Russians from doing what they like. On their part the Japanese are not likely to deliver any serious attack until the Baltic Fleet nears Formosa, though small steamers using mines and torpedoes may be sent further afield, and may succeed in inflicting a certain amount of damage, since, if the war has shown that the danger of torpedoes to ships in motion is small it has also proved the deadly efficacy of mines. As the Russians laid mines on the high seas, and so destroyed the Hatsuse and Yashima, they cannot complain if the Baltic Fleet is attacked in the same terrible manner, and the Japanese are known to have made special arrangements,

The National Review.

which will, it is believed, inflict heavy losses on the Russians, if only their ships can be located.

Practically, it will be seen, the issue of the war hinges upon two factors. The first and most important of these is the attitude of neutrals to Admiral Rojdestvensky's formidable fleet; the second is the destruction by the Japanese of the Russian warships in Port Arthur. If neutrals do their duty, it is exceedingly doubtful whether the Baltic Fleet can reach the Far East. If they do not, and if the Port Arthur ships are destroyed, the Baltic Fleet will even so probably return to Europe and not risk a collision with Admiral Togo. But if the two factors prove unfavorable to Japan, then the approach of the Baltic Fleet may prove the most serious menace conceivable to our ally.

H. W. Wilson.

My pedometer told me that I was twenty-five; and, though it is a shocking thing to stop walking, I was so tired that I sat down on a milestone to rest. People outstripped me, making long noses as they did so; but I was too apathetic to feel resentful, and even when Miss Eliza Dimbleby, the great educationist, swept past, exhorting me to persevere, I only smiled and raised my hat.

At first I thought I was going to be like my brother, whom I had had to leave by the roadside a year or two round the corner. He had wasted his breath on singing, and his strength on helping others. But I had travelled more wisely; and now it was only the monotony of the highway that oppressed me-dust under foot and brown

1

crackling hedges on either side, ever since I could remember.

And I had already dropped several things-indeed, the road behind was strewn with the things we all had dropped; and the white dust was settling down on them, so that already they looked no better than stones. My muscles were so weary that I could not even bear the weight of those things I still carried. I slid off the milestone into the road, and lay there prostrate, with my face to the great parched hedge, praying that I might give up.

A little puff of air revived me. It seemed to come from the hedge; and, when I opened my eyes, there was a glint of light through the tangle of boughs and dead leaves. The hedge

could not be as thick as usual. In my weak, morbid state, I longed to force my way in, and see what was on the other side. No one was in sight, or I should not have dared to try. For we of the road do not admit in conversation that there is another side at all.

I yielded to the temptation, saying to myself that I would come back in a minute. The thorns scratched my face, and I had to use my arms as a shield, depending on my feet alone to push me forward. Halfway through I would have gone back, for in the passage all the things I was carrying were scraped off me, and my clothes were torn. But I was so wedged that return was impossible; and I had to wriggle blindly forward, expecting every moment that my strength would fail me, and that I should perish in the undergrowth.

Suddenly cold water closed round my head, and I seemed sinking down for ever. I had fallen out of the hedge into a deep pool. I rose to the surface at last, crying for help, and I heard someone on the opposite bank laugh and say: "Another!" And then I was twitched out and laid panting on the dry ground.

Even when the water was out of my eyes, I was still dazed; for I had never been in so large a space, nor seen such grass and sunshine. The blue sky was no longer a strip; and beneath it the earth had risen grandly into hills-clean, bare buttresses, with beech trees in their folds, and meadows and clear pools at their feet. But the hills were not high; and there was in the landscape a sense of human occupation-so that one might have called it a park, or garden, if the words did not imply a certain triviality and constraint.

As soon as I got my breath, I turned to my rescuer and said:

"Where does this place lead to?"

"Nowhere, thank the Lord!" said he, and laughed. He was a man of fifty or sixty-just the kind of age we mistrust on the road-but there was no anxiety in his manner, and his voice was that of a boy of eighteen.

"But it must lead somewhere!" I cried, too much surprised at his answer to thank him for saving my life.

"He wants to know where it leads!" he shouted to some men on the hill side, and they laughed back, and waved their caps.

I noticed then that the pool into which I had fallen was really a moat which bent round to the left and to the right, and that the hedge followed it continually. The hedge was green on this side-its roots showed through the clear water, and fish swam about in them-and it was wreathed over with dog-roses and Traveller's Joy. But it was a barrier, and in a moment I lost all pleasure in the grass, the sky, the trees, the happy men and women, and realized that the place was but a prison, for all its beauty and extent.

We moved away from the boundary, and then followed a path almost parallel to it, across the meadows. I found it difficult walking, for I was always trying to out-distance my companion, and there was no advantage in doing this if the place led nowhere. I had never kept step with anyone since I left my brother.

I amused him by stopping suddenly and saying disconsolately, "This is perfectly terrible. One cannot advance: one cannot progress. Now we of the road-"

"Yes. I know."

"I was going to say, we advance continually."

"I know."

"We are always learning, expanding, developing. Why, even in my short life I have seen a great deal of advancethe Transvaal War, the Fiscal Ques

"Lots of things don't work in here." he said. "One day a man brought in a Lee-Metford, and that wouldn't work."

"The laws of science are universal in their application. It must be the water in the moat that has injured the machinery. In normal conditions everything works. Science and the spirit of emulation-those are the forces that have made us what we are."

I had to break off and acknowledge the pleasant greetings of people whom we passed. Some of them were singing, some talking, some engaged in gardening, hay-making, or other rudimentary industries. They all seemed happy; and I might have been happy too, if I could have forgotten that the place led nowhere.

I was startled by a young man who came sprinting across our path, took a little fence in fine style, and went tearing over a ploughed field till he plunged into a lake, across which he began to swim. Here was true energy, and I exclaimed: "A cross-country race! Where are the others?"

"There are no others," my companion replied; and, later on, when we passed some long grass from which came the voice of a girl singing exquisitely to herself, he said again: "There are no others." I was bewildered at the waste in production, and murmured to myself, "What does it all mean?"

He said: "It means nothing but itself" and he repeated the words slowly, as if I was a child.

"I understand," I said quietly, "but I do not agree. Every achievement is

worthless unless it is a link in the chain of development. And I must not trespass on your kindness any longer. I must get back somehow to the road, and have my pedometer mended."

"First, you must see the gates," he replied, "for we have gates, though we never use them."

I yielded politely, and before long we reached the moat again, at a point where it was spanned by a bridge. Over the bridge was a big gate, as white as ivory, which was fitted into a gap in the boundary hedge. The gate opened outwards, and I exclaimed in amazement, for from it ran a road -just such a road as I had left-dusty under foot, with brown crackling hedges on either side as far as the eye could reach.

"That's my road!" I cried.

He shut the gate and said: "But not your part of the road. It is through this gate that humanity went out some thousand years ago, when it was first seized with the desire to walk."

I denied this, observing that the part of the road I myself had left was not more than two miles off. But with the obstinacy of his years he repeated: "It is the same road. This is the beginning, and though it seems to run straight away from us, it doubles so often, that it is never far from our boundary and sometimes touches it." He stooped down by the moat, and traced on its moist margin an absurd figure like a maze. As we walked back through the meadows, I tried to convince him of his mistake.

"The road sometimes doubles, to be sure, but that is part of our discipline. Who can doubt that its general tendency is onward. To what goal we know not-it may be to some mountain where we shall touch the sky, it may be over precipices into the sea. But that it goes forward-who can doubt that? It is the thought of that that