Spanish war that the United States can be correctly said to have definitely taken a conspicuous place in the politics of the world, the extraordinary developments in the Presidential power which that step brings with it have hardly yet been realized, but it will help every day to exalt him at the expense of the Legislature. The declarations regarding the Monroe Doctrine which Mr. Roosevelt himself and leading supporters have made of late involve similar results. No man in his position can help contemplating with envy the free hand allowed a British Minister in the manipulation of foreign affairs, but, if not Mr. Roosevelt, then some early successor will find himself no less generously entrusted with the national interests of the United States. The dangers and difficulties inherent in any attempt to conduct complicated negotiations through representative bodies may any day appear aggressively insistent even to the average American. A business people will quickly appreciate the most The Saturday Review. businesslike way of conducting public affairs. Hitherto the existing framework has sufficiently served public requirements. The new developments make it quite impossible that they can do so much longer. In spite of all the precautions of the founders of the Constitution the time is rapidly approaching when in electing the President the people will recognize that they endow him for a season with prerogatives more than regal because he embodies their own absolutism. The American public will in the end welcome this solution as the British have done who have slid by almost imperceptible gradations into accepting the rule of a practically despotic ministry for a terminable period. The Legislature in both cases becomes a hortatory and minatory, not a governing, body. The people take supreme interest in the character and capacity of their rulers whom they may accept or reject but less every day in the inconclusive discussions of elective assemblies. BOOKS AND AUTHORS. Randall Parrish's new novel, "My Lady of the North," as the experienced reader guesses from the title, is a story of the Civil war. Told in the first person by one of Lee's cavalry officers, it presents a rapid succession of incidents, interwoven with a mysterious romance whose secret is not disclosed till the final chapter. Guerilla raids play a striking part in the plot. A. C. McClurg & Co. The novel of international intrigue is forging to the front, nowadays, and E. Phillips Oppenheim makes a striking contribution to the list with his "Mysterious Mr. Sabin." The plot centres in the attempts of two rival Continental Powers to gain possession of a set of papers known to contain secret information regarding the coast defences and naval strength of England, but to the mysterious Mr. Sabin their schemes are only preliminary to a daring and romantic enterprise of his own, in which are involved the fortunes of the charming heroine. With so congenial a theme, Mr. Oppenheim's remarkable ingenuity and command of detail are seen at their best, and his readers will follow the narrative with keen interest to the last of his four hundred closely printed pages. Little, Brown & Co. PUBLIC LIBRARY ASTOR, LENOX THE LIVING AGE: I Weekly Magazine of Contemporary Literature and Thought. Tokens of the coming storm are now many and unmistakable, and cries are heard that the Russian ship of State is in danger. But they are the fears of men of little faith. It is not the ship of State that is in peril. That stout vessel will weather worse storms than any as yet experienced in Europe, not excepting the tempest of 1789. Manned by a hardy, buoyant, resourceful crew, it has nought to fear. Nothing is now at issue beyond the present trip and the rights and duties of the skipper. And on those questions a decision must soon be taken. For compass and chart have been put aside and we are drifting towards rocks and sandbanks. Of the crew-with no goal to attract, no commander to inspirit them some are indifferent and many sluggish while the most active are preparing to mutiny. They all merge their welfare in the safety of the ship, and as a consequence would persuade or if necessary compel the captain to take a pilot on board. It is in that temper-for which history may perhaps find a less harsh term than criminalthat the real and only danger lies. To point out that danger and help to ward it off were the legitimate objects of my former article1; and the means I used were honestly adjusted to those ends. If I pitched my voice in too high a key, it was for fear I should fail to strike ears that had long been deaf to loud warnings; if I touched my imperial master with ungentle hand, it was because I believed he was on the point of drowning. Honi soit qui mal y pense. I may have been mistaken. Coming events will perhaps soon enable my critics to measure the distance that separated my judgment from political wisdom and my intentions from enlightened loyalty. Meanwhile I am solaced by the thought that history knows of fellow countrymen of mine, honored by rulers and ruled, who caused far greater pain than I have done to individual Tsars and Tsarivitches, in 1 See "The Tsar" in The Living Age, August 27, 1904. day a broader view than that of the eighteenth century is permissible and a Russian official may now hearken to the dictates of patriotism, even when they clash with the promptings of loyalty to his Tsar. If we have not yet wholly forgotten our national saying: "whose bread I eat, his song I sing," we are at least beginning to render unto Russia the things that are Russia's without refusing to the Tsar the things that are the Tsar's. My sketch of Nicholas II. has been yery favorably received throughout the world as harmonizing in essentials with the Emperor's public words and acts. But it has been found fault with too as all attempts to fix for ever what is ever in flux will and should be. "The very truth," says our poet, Tiutcheff, "when clad in words becomes a lie." How much more an attempt to outline a character, whose essential traits so far elude analysis that even to close observers it seems little more than a negation. The very courtiers who claim to know the Emperor best are unable though willing to credit him with any of those positive qualities which psychologists designate as the groundwork of virile character. Indeed in their sincere moods they speak of him as susceptible less to clear-cut motives than to vague influence and ascribe his acts to emdtional impulse rather than to reflective will. Another difficulty was created by the limitations of my task. I had to do with the visionary autocrat only, prescinding almost entirely from the man. Otherwise, I should have gladly brought out in relief certain engaging features of the individual, Nicolai Alexandrovitch Romanoff, which form a pleasing set-off to the forbidding aspect of the Tsar Nicholas II. Thus, I would have emphasized the fact that he is an uncommonly dutiful son, who interprets filial respect more generously than the followers of Confucius, having fre quently submitted not his will only but also his judgment to that of his august mother. A model húsband, he leaves little undone to ensure the happiness of his imperial consort. A tender father, he literally adores his children with an almost maternal fervor, and often magnanimously deprives himself of the keen pleasure which the discharge of the clerical duties of kingship confers in order to watch over his darling little Grand Duke and Grand Duchesses and to see that sunshine brightens those lives dear to millions. What, for instance, could be more touching or sympathetic than the picture-which courtiers draw for us-of the dread autocrat of all the Russias anxiously superintending the details of the bathing of his little son, the Grand Duke Alexis, at the height of the diplomatic storm raised by the North Sea incident? What could be more idyllic than the pretty human weakness betokened by the joyful exclamation with which the great potentate suddenly interrupted Rojdestvensky who was making a report on the Baltic Squadron: "But are you aware he weighs 14 lbs. ?" "Who, your Majesty?" asked the Admiral, his mind still entangled in questions of displacement, quick-firing guns, and other kindred matters. "The Heir to the throne," answered the happy father. Touches of nature like this offer a refreshing contrast to the Byzantine stiffness of the autocrat bending over his table and writing marginal glosses. A most obliging disposition also marks his intercourse with foreign dynasties, and perhaps warrants the sharpness with which some of their members censured my uncourtly frankness. For Tsar Nicholas has often gone out of his way to do them a good turn, and never willingly refuses their requests for concessions industrial, commercial, and political. Indeed, he has been known to grant them when compliance involved tremendous sacrifices on the part of his much-enduring subjects. In proof of this amiable trait, were it called in question, I could give the names and summarize the letters of princes, princesses, and monarchs who have repeatedly tested the good nature of their worthy cousin, by craving for industrial concessions, shipping subsidies, and lucrative trading privileges-to say nothing of territorial grants-to bestow which even a Russian autocrat sometimes needs a strong tincture of what courtiers would term moral courage. To these amiable traits I was precluded from doing justice. I could hardly even touch upon the broad indulgence shown by Nicholas II. to the shortcomings of his Russian kith and kin, which in degree oftentimes borders upon participation. It was thus that, after he had forbidden the Grand Ducal band to begrime themselves in the mire of Corean concessions, he first withdrew the prohibition and then himself became a shareholder in the venture, risking his millions andwhat ought to have been of greater value than money's worth-his fair For no one who knows the Emperor will for a moment ascribe this faux pas to any such sordid motives as those avowed by his uncles and cousins. It was the kindly act of a man who feels that blood is thicker than water, and wishes to express the sentiment in deeds. Unfortunately history, which deals summarily with men and motives, will be scarcely less shocked at finding Nicholas II. among the profit-hunters of the Far East than name. 'One, I am told, is widely (and favorably known as the amateur photographer of the money-bags of our Treasury, and another has acquired so thorough a knowledge of the unseen world and such intimacy with its most at the sight of Voltaire illegally jobbing with a Jew in Saxon securities. To be severely frowned down by certain of those august personages, whose fondness for our Tsar is thus solidly grounded, I was quite prepared. Noblesse oblige. Neither was I surprised by the strictures of the few Englishspeaking critics who thrust aside the sketch I drew as a mere fancy picture, because they failed to recognize in it the statesmanlike traits of the great and good monarch who in his inscrutable wisdom had once admitted them to his presence for twenty and thirty minutes respectively. But I was astonished that one fault should have been found with my drawing, which even a hasty comparison with the original would have disproved. I had charged the Tsar, it was said, with sins of commission, while his self-appointed advocates plead guilty in his name at most to sins of omission. His Majesty, they urged, may be gifted with a will which like pure gold, is most malleable; he may wear his heart too often on his sleeve, and political daws may peck at it, but to describe him as defying his Ministers and overriding the majority of his Imperial Council, is to lampoon, not to portray him. It runs counter to his character. For Providence, out of love for its chosen people of to-day, endowed him with "the temperament of an Imperial Hamlet." Here facts alone, I submit, should turn the scale, and facts in support of my thesis are plentiful and decisive. One of the most striking is the isolation of the autocrat who stands on his lofty pedestal like Simon Stylites on his pillar or the ex-Dalai Lama in his monastery. There is not one minister now in the Emperor's Council Chamber truthful denizens that he was once spoken of in Russiajas a possible successor to M. Philippe as Medium-in-waiting to the Tsar. "Sed dis aliter visum est." |