the process. The result was a Bill that broke all ante-election promises, increased the burden on the consumer, and was regarded by the country generally with dislike and by the Republicans of the Middle West, where there is genuine movement for Tariff revision downwards, with active opposition. Mr. Taft sat in the White House and gave no sign while the weary weeks of debate stretched into months. It was not until the Bill went to the conference between the Senate and the House of Representatives to receive its final shape that the President intervened. But his intervention, though late, was effective. He insisted on a considerable lowering of the rates in certain specific schedules. For a moment it looked as though there would be a serious clash between the White House and Congress. But the President had chosen his ground too well; every one of his demands was complied with; and the Payne Bill in the form in which it became law was probably a better measure than Mr. Roosevelt would have been able to secure without disrupting his party and convulsing the country.

Mr. Taft moreover contrived to slip into the Bill a clause empowering the Federal Government to levy a tax of 1 per cent. on the net earnings of all corporations. This is an innovation so momentous that it may justly be called revolutionary. If its legality is upheld by the Supreme Court, it will for the first time in American history enable the Central Government to supervise, regulate, and tax every joint-stock company in the land-even though it holds its charter from a State-whose profits exceed £1000 a year. That is the longest step which has been taken in our time towards the readjustment in favor of the Central Government of the Constitutional balance of powera balance that hitherto has inclined somewhat peremptorily to the side of

the States. The power to tax, as Judge Marshall long ago pointed out, is the power to destroy, and though there is no question of the Federal Government destroying the Trusts or taxing the States out of their vitality, yet undoubtedly, if the Supreme Court sanetions the proposed impost on corporations, State rights will have received a blow not less severe than that dealt by the Civil War, and most of the existing text-books on the American Constitution will have to be rewritten. The inevitable corollary to the corporation tax is an Act depriving the States of their present power to charter jointstock companies and vesting it in the Federal Government. Such an Act in our judgment would be a move in the right direction, and could easily be justified by an appeal to the political and economic conditions of the times. But clearly it would transform the American Constitution almost beyond recognition. In any case to have effected so formidable an advance in the direction of centralization, to have brought the Trusts within range of the Federal taxing power, and to have done all this without forfeiting for a moment the good-will of the nation or losing a single vote in Congress-must be counted to Mr. Taft's credit as one of the most remarkable feats of American statesmanship.

During his recent tour the President touched on many questions, such as banking and currency reform, the establishment of postal savings banks, and the amendment of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which are mainly domestic questions, and of little moment to the outside world, except of course that anything which promises to make the American monetary system more stable by making it more elastic will be welcomed by every stock exchange in Europe. What fate Mr. Taft's programme in these matters will meet with when Congress assembles in De

cember we should not care to predict, though at this distance the omens look bright. There is however one part of his policy which is of international as well as American importance. Both in China and in South America Mr. Taft is devoting himself, as no President ever has before, to extending American commerce by a lavish use of Governmental assistance. Americans hitherto have regarded their foreign trade as a sort of overflow from their home trade, a way to dispose of their surplus. They have neither studied nor cultivated the field as carefully as the Germans and ourselves have been obliged to study and cultivate it. Their total foreign trade, imports and exports combined, is little more than a tenth of their internal commerce. Their exports therefore are roughly about 5 per cent. of their total domestic trade. Of these exports, agricultural products and the products of mines, forests and fisheries represent over 70 per cent., and manufactures less than 30 per cent.

America, in short, still owes the place she has taken among the trading nations more to the bounty of nature than to the skill of man. The Outlook.

Her capital

ists have not been attracted by what seem to them the meagre returns of the ocean-carrying trade, of banking, of individual investments in (for example) South America, when compared with the profits of home enterprises or of exports through long-established and convenient channels to the more remunerative markets of Europe. Now however they are just beginning to feel the need of further foreign outlets for their manufactures, and it is in China and South America that they hope chiefly to find them. Mr. Taft will do everything in his power to forward this tendency and to guide it along to the most productive routes. Schemes for subsidizing steamship lines to South American and Far Eastern ports, for founding semi-private, semi-official banks on the German model, for improving the consular service, and for undertaking trade investigations, will find in him, as he has freely declared, a warm and convinced supporter. We shall not indeed be surprised if the expansion of American commerce throughout the Southern and Far Eastern Continents proves to be the most memorable fact of his Presidency.

Throughout all nature, the abnormal individuals have ever been subjected to aggression and ill-treatment. Among the lower animals, and to a certain extent among men, it would seem probable that any deviation from the appearance or the habits of the herd is instinctively associated in the minds of the majority with something that is strange and external, and therefore with what is hostile and to be attacked. Hence the repugnance to foreigners and strangers evinced everywhere, and the contempt and hatred

of, say, white and yellow people for one another, when they are forced to live in close proximity. The submerged criminal minorities are defective and troublesome; they are not proper, placid, or pleasant; they cumber the ground like the autumn leaves, and are always being swept away and thrown into dark places to corrupt out of sight. In the Middle Ages their existence was attributed to their own wicked perversity in listening to the seductions of the Devil; and this was most clearly stated upon all indict

ments up to a few short years ago. Cesare Lombroso was one of a band of scientific enquirers (including his compatriot Ferri, Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, and a whole vanguard of Germans). who began to seek material causes for physical actions. Nothing he imagined, and rightly, occurred by chance or through the promptings of unmeaning malevolence. He started to examine the whole structure of the convicted, and then found so many defects and peculiarities that he contended there were born criminals.

Having begun to weigh and measure Caliban and his tribe, and having found them mostly simious and misshapen, he was sometimes led to apply his formulæ indiscriminately; he would deduce too much from insufficient data, and frequently detected potential Hydes in distinguished Jekylls. In short, having made some discoveries. he was apt to exaggerate from them. Therefore, while we must be grateful for his many contributions to the incipient and much-needed science of criminology, we cannot accept all his conclusions and wide generalizations without occasional reservations and sometimes a grain of salt. Still he did good in laying so much stress upon the bad physique of the unfortunate, and in thus emphasizing the undoubted truth that health is a great factor in conduct. "The moral demonstration," said Dr. Claye Shaw, giving evidence before Mr. Herbert Gladstone's Committee, "depends on the perfection of physical structure." Impair the mental machinery for an hour, by poison, by alcohol, by injury or disease, and where might not any one of us be landed; who could rely upon direction or self-control?

There are really no born criminals, and there is no criminal class; but there are innumerable born degenerates, and what they drift into depends upon circumstances. "Given a certain

environment," said Dr. Bevan Lewis before the Committee alluded to, "and you will have crime; given a more favorable environment and you will have simply insanity." Even that strong exponent of the hardest officialism, Sir Edmund Du Cane, admitted that “a large number of prisoners are persons who are absolutely unable, or find it extremely difficult, through mental or physical incapacity to earn their livelihood even under favorable circumstances." A former governor of Pentonville declared, of a certain class of his habitual prisoners, that he had "those half-witted creatures coming again and again to prison." "Deficiencies in memory, imagination, reason," said the Rev. Dr. Morrison, who knew prisoners well, "are three undoubted characteristics of the ordinary criminal intellect." These unhappy beings in all the various stages of psychopathy and distortion are the material from which prisoners are made. When we consider how often ordinary people are overcome by temptation, and that many a lost boat's crew of decent Europeans have, from the mere force of conditions, been driven to cannibalism, we cannot expect the defective and the unbalanced to hold their own in a competitive community. So, doubtless, as Dr. Maudsley pointed out, we do manufacture our criminals like any other artificial product, only the process is a complex and unconscious

one.

We must hope that the work of Professor Lombroso and of the many other modern writers upon the problems of criminology, may help forward and hasten the most urgent of all prison reforms, which is classification. There is infinite difference between those various groups of offenders who now fill the same dock, and receive-in different doses the same sort of treatment, or rather punishment. What a man did on a particular day is only one

symptom, and not always the most important, of the kind of man he is. It is only too certain, and it is sad indeed to reflect upon, that there are many persons hard and fast in prison at this hour, on account of abnormalities or defects which they could no more keep away by their own efforts than they could stave off mania or the spotted fever. For though the grotesquely mad are now taken care of and well treated, even if they have murdered people, and are sent to Broadmoor, the half-mad and obscurely afThe Saturday Review.

flicted are held to be swayed by merely Lormal desires and to possess full measure of self-control. All specialists know that it is otherwise, and that things will be altogether changed in the long run. It is not opposition that must be faced, but the dead weight of indifference. We want more men like Lombroso to set down facts, to ask of the afflicted, to weigh, and learn, so that in all our dealings with degenerates we may be able to look forward to the future, and not dwell morbidly upon what cannot be undone.

The Press may not have abolished diplomacy, but it has certainly made it more difficult. But for the Press Mr. Crane would now be on his way to the American Legation at Pekin. As it is. he remains in America, is re-absorbed once more into his manufacturing busi ness in Chicago, and finds his diplomatic life ended before it had really begun. The Press, however, is not to be exclusively blamed for this catas trophe. Mr. Crane's artlessness is at least partly responsible. The Presi dent, greatly concerned with the prob lem of how best to extend American influence, and especially American commerce, in the Far East, had ap pointed Mr. Crane to represent his country in China mainly on the strength of his reputation and success as a man of business. But he had not reckoned with Mr. Crane's innocence of diplomatic usages, or with the possibility that he might share the common American belief that official affairs should be transacted in a glass house, with all the electric lights turned on. and a reporter at each window. Calling at the State Department in Washington for his final instructions, Mr. Crane learned that the Secretary

of State had been closely examining the recent Agreement between China and Japan in regard to Manchuria, with a view to determining if it contained anything adverse to American interests or inconsistent with the principle of the "Open Door." With an ingenuousness that has not been equalled since the Sackville-West episode, Mr. Crane at once communicated the news to a journalist for publication, and departed for San Francisco. It was thus announced to the world that the United States Government was formulating a protest against the Manchurian Agreement, and that it would be Mr. Crane's first business on his arrival, to bring the views of the Administration before the Chinese officials. The Chinese and Japanese Press, naturally enough, reproduced the telegram; some formal inquiries were made by the Japanese Ambassador in Washington; and Mr. Crane was met on the San Francisco wharf by a telegram ordering his return to the capital. He went back, not only with an untroubled con. science, but in a state of complete mystification as to the reasons for his sudden recall, engagingly confiding to the reporters that he could not make

head or tail of it. It was, however, eventually made clear to him that his indiscreet "interview" had caused the Administration much embarrassment, and that the interests of the country and of the service required his resignation.

Incidents such as these are bound from time to time to occur in a country which regards diplomacy rather as a diversion than a career. Two or

three years ago, Mr. Root, at that time the Secretary of State, attempted a thorough reorganization of the American diplomatic and consular services. Among other things he insisted that the United States should lease or purchase a permanent Embassy in each of the world's capitals and should pay its Ambassadors a living wage. When Mr. Choate returned home after his six years' Ambassadorship in London, the first thing he did was to urge precisely these reforms. No one could do so with greater propriety or with a stronger claim to have his opinion deferred to, because no one had produced such excellent results from the present system. Mr. Roosevelt several times over entreated Congress to carry out the suggested improvements, and a Bill giving effect to them was actually introduced in the House of Representatives. But it failed to become law, and matters are still as they always have been. That is to say, an American Ambassador's first business on arriving in London or any other capital is to find a house to live in. No official residence being provided for him, he has to turn house-hunter; and the sort of house he will choose depends upon his private means. All Government officials in America from the President downwards are amazingly underpaid, but American Ambassadors can scarcely be said to be paid at all. Their fixed and inclusive salary is £3,500 a year, but of this they have to pay their own house rent as well as all

living and entertainment expenses. The consequence is that only very wealthy men, who are prepared to spend from £10,000 a year upwards out of their own pockets, can afford to accept a first-class Embassy and keep up the style that the diplomacy of today insists upon. For though the American Republic is officially devoted to Jeffersonian simplicity, its citizens who annually come over to Europe are something more than disappointed if they find that their representative in London, Paris, Berlin, or Rome is not resplendently housed and maintaining a generous social state. They may, when in America, deride the trappings of diplomacy, but at the same time, and especially in Europe, they like their Ambassador to play an elegant, conspicuous, and, if possible, a brilliant part in the life of the Court to which he is accredited. If the Americans in Berlin, for instance, had been polled eighteen months ago, they would certainly have voted to make Mr. Charlemagne Tower Ambassador for life; and they were just as much nonplussed as the Kaiser himself when Mr. Tower's successor turned out to be a gentleman whose tastes were those of a student and a scholar, and whose resources made it impossible for him to follow in Mr. Tower's footsteps with the same assurance and éclat.

One result of all this is that the American diplomatic service lends itself to some strange incongruities. In one capital you will find the American Ambassador inhabiting a palace, the rent of which exceeds his official salary; in another he is worse housed than the average representative of a Balkan State. It is becoming rarer and rarer for the United States to send abroad men like Bancroft, Lowell, Motley, and Washington Irving, men, that is to say, of comparatively moderate means, who were appointed and welcomed as litterateurs of distinction, and