his finger upon the pulse of his company. The poor use the word "study" in the sense of "humor." They speak of a sensitive child who must be studied. The expression may be incorrect, but it is illuminating. To know how to humor is to know how to make oneself liked. The man determined to be popular works within limits, and he may be actuated by almost the highest or by almost the lowest motives. He may be truly anxious for peace and goodwill, a man to whom all jar and friction, all displays of anger, all suggestions of insult, are repulsive and hateful, and who will forgo much to avoid their occurrence. A world in which all men thus desired to be popular would be a very pleasant world. The man who wants to be liked must make sacrifices. The only question is whether he will offer up his preferences alone or also his principles. In the first case he may become a sort of secular saint; in the second he may stoop till he is the object of every upright man's contempt. Even so, he cannot fall quite to the bottom of the moral scale, because he must be in some sense unselfish. There is no doubt a superficial unselfishness which is only remotely related to the real thing, an unselfishness which is only a self-interested form of self-control. Again, there is a seeming unselfishness which is too cheap to be good. There are certain people who are from childhood vague in their desires. We connect crossness and melancholy with the people who "do not know what they want"; but some very happy people are blessed with this curious indifference. Their minds unfasten easily; they are never set upon having or doing any one particular thing. Consequently they appear unselfish, though often they are without that active sympathy from which real unselfishness springs. Men or women to whom it is an effort to give in who in childhood seem obstinate and contrary, and in youth insist on having their own way-may when they come to years of discretion be capable of a self-renunciation of which the easygoing person can hardly conceive, and that though they will never give in without a wrench. But even the most corrupt forms of altruism are higher than mere brute egoism, certain of its goal and careless of all means. Acquired popularity is always a difficult quality to judge of outside one's own circle. Who has not wondered when he discovered that suchand-such a servant or such-and-such a working man or woman was exceedingly popular among his equals? Very possibly he is a man whom his employer has never genuinely liked, a man understanding and understood by his own class exclusively, one who, metaphorically speaking, talks a patois. Perhaps the fact that the different grades of society have such different senses of humor have something to do with the matter. In dull societies the power to create a laugh is overvalued, and no doubt that hateful form of pleasantry best described as facetiousness passes for wit below a certain standard of education. We are often told that the sense of humor is a bond; but how much more often is it a barrier? The educated section of the middle class seem sometimes to be quite hemmed in by it. They see the lower classes through it- their sympathy is all tinged with a kindly satire -and they are divided by it from the leisured class, into whose mirth there enters an admixture of hilarity which is sometimes attractive, sometimes repellent. always somewhat foreign to the brain-worker. Again, how strangely humor divides the generations! Only the very great wits live, and some of them do not live by their wit. Half the world would say, if they spoke the truth, that when they go to see a play of Shakespeare's, while they are driven into hate and fall into love, are mentally astounded and emotionally moved at the great poet's will, they only laugh because they feel that cultivated and virile persons ought to appreciate Shakespeare's humor. But to return to the subject of popularity. We do not think that socially popular people have the greatest number of friends in the truest sense of the word "friendship," even if we cut out all those persons who seek popularity from a low motive, and retain only those whose graces ensure it or whose well-meant efforts have attained to it. They are no doubt the people who go most easily through the mill of life, The Spectator. but somehow in that mill they seem to have lost something of individuality. They resemble each other, and as a rule there is nothing in them above the comprehension of the majority. Like other rich men, they lose some of those experiences which tend to make men wise and kind. Life comes too easily to them. They are terribly apt to become proud of their treasure, and to judge other men by their popularity, asking how well they are liked, not what they are. They tend to appraise the world by false tests. Nevertheless, they are the capitalists of society. Without them the business of recreation could not go on. AN AMERICAN EXPERIMENT. Porto Rico, it was recently announced, is to have a new Governor, the seventh or eighth new Governor it has been privileged to welcome since it became an American possession. Unlike his predecessors, the newest Governor has a thorough knowledge of the Spanish language, and the hope was expressed, in the cablegram announcing his appointment, that this accomplishment would "aid Mr. Cotton in winning back the good-will of the natives." The inference that all is not going well with the American experiment in the West Indies is, we fear, justified. The Americans have done a great deal of excellent work in Porto Rico, but they have not yet succeeded in winning either the respect or the affection of the people. They have built some four hundred miles of roads, over two-and-a-half times as much as the Spaniards built in three centuries. They have set up one hundred and sixty schools. They have established free trade between Porto Rico and the United States, and the duties levied on Porto Rican products entering American ports during the first year or two of the occupation amounting to some £400,000 they voluntarily turned over to the insular Government. All the moneys raised in the island by local taxation, except ten per cent. to defray the cost of collection, are distributed among the townships, and are expended by them without interference from the United States. All the moneys raised by Federal taxation custom dues and internal revenue -are spent for the benefit of the Porto Ricans. The United States derives nothing in the nature of a tribute from her ownership of the island. On the contrary she loses by it. She pays out of her own pocket the cost of the local army, the revenue vessels, the lighthouse service, the coast surveys, the harbor improvements, the postoffice deficit, the weather bureau, and the upkeep of the agricultural experiment station. She appropriated £40,000 to the relief of the islanders after the terrible hurricane of 1899. American energy has practically banished smallpox, and has greatly diminished anæmia among the natives. There can be no question that the island is better off materially than it ever was under Spanish rule. Trade has made consid erable strides; land values have more than trebled. The people enjoy all the constitutional guarantees of American citizenship. They have an effective share in framing their own laws; they are freely admitted into the Civil Service; they have the advantage of living under a Government that, as Governments go, is honest, enterprising, and stable. Yet they are not grateful, they are not happy. With every year that passes, their grievances seem to multiply and the gulf between themselves and their American rulers to widen. Last April they dispatched a delegation to lay their complaints before the American Congress, and a few weeks later President Taft felt obliged to send a special message to Congress dealing with the legislative deadlock in the island and recommending a farreaching change in the organic law of its government. One of the grievances of the Porto Ricans is that they are now without a country. They have lost their Spanish citizenship and the United States has refused and probably will always refuse to admit them into the American Union. Another grievance is that, in spite of universal suffrage, they do not possess the reality of self-government. There are two Houses in the Porto Rican legislature, the House of Delegates, a popularly elected body, and the Senate, composed of five Porto Ricans and six Americans, the six Americans being also the heads of the chief executive departments. As there can be no legislation and no public expenditure without the consent of both these bodies, it follows either that the six Americans in the Senate get their own way in everything, or that there deadlock is a Houses the Senate, for instance, refusing to concur in legislation sent up by the House of Delegates, and the House of Delegates retaliating by declining to vote any moneys with which to carry on the Government until their measures are adopted. Again, by applying the American tariff to all foreign imports into Porto Rico, the Americans cut off the islanders from their familiar markets in Spain and France without furnishing them with a new one in the United States. This has been particularly the case in regard to the coffee trade, which is to-day considerably worse off than before the American occupation. Although the exports and imports figures as a whole are higher than they were in Spanish days, the increase is mainly due to the growing cultivation of sugar and tobacco, crops which for the most part are owned by absentee speculators in Spain and the United States. The flounderings of American lawyers among Spanish usages, the heedlessness of Congress in placing the island upon a gold basis almost at a moment's notice, and the laws enacted at Washington in the early days of the occupation, when the whole of America was in one of its periodic alarms over the trusts, penalizing every form of corporate enteprise in Porto Rico, have all tended to hinder development and foster discontent. between the two But undoubtedly the most fertile source of friction between the Americans and their wards is the class of men hitherto sent to the island as officials and administrators. Here we touch a weakness that has already been painfully visible in the Philippines and Hawaii, and that seems likely to impair the whole American experiment in "colonial" government. Our own experience goes to show that, to rule successfully, a stable, competitive, high-salaried Civil Service is indispensable. But Americans habitually gone since the American plunge into Imperialism, yet nothing has been done to organize a colonial service that would attract the best men in the country. Moreover, the average American has no desire to rule. It is not a part of his makeup. He has neither inherited it in the blood nor does his school training supply it. A colonial career offers few inducements to him. If he is ambitious there is no country with one-hundredth part of the opportunities to offer that America throws at his feet. If he is pining for adventure, where will he find it if not in the United States? There is no problem of the younger son in America to supply an incentive to expatriation. ordinary American youth shrinks almost as readily as the ordinary French youth from the idea of exile. He is unused to solitude; he is reared in an emiThe Nation. The nently sociable and gregarious environment; and the ideal of a comfortable old age on a pension hardly ever enters his head. The professional and commercial rewards open to him in his own country are so enormous and so tempting, and service under Government adds so little to an American's standing in his community, that the thought of accepting an office in the Philippines or Porto Rico seems almost like a confession of defeat in the battle of life. Moreover, Americans have little of the protecting, elderbrotherly feeling towards men of another color that unquestionably redeems the arrogance of British Imperialism. On the contrary, they are far more likely to feel a physical repugnance for the brown man and the black. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that the governors in their dependencies should succeed one another with bewildering rapidity, and that the conduct, character, and personality of the officials under them should fail to win good-will for American rule. CHARLES READE, THE NOVELIST. * Charles Reade spent five hours a day in a room that he called "the workshop." The most conspicuous piece of furniture in this room was a large table, battered and worn, underneath which there stood an odd score of tall folios, the nature of their contents being indicated by labels upon the backs. At this table Charles Reade would sit, selecting, cutting, and pasting into its proper place every scrap of fact or experience, written or printed, that he judged to contain anything of interest -anything, that is, which might conceivably be of use to him as literary material. Everything was indexed. Any"The Cloister and the Hearth." By Charles Reade. London: Chatto and Windus. 1909. 12s. 6d. net. His art thing could be found at a moment's notice. The culmination of the system was to be found in the Index ad Indices. From the Index ad Indices he could find his way to the correct index. From the correct index he could find his way to the particular slip or cutting that he wanted. His workshop was a triumph of method. was a triumph of empiricism. It was the peculiarity of Charles Reade that he must begin with dry bones in order to arrive at something very like flesh and blood. He had the power to imagine and to inform his creatures with the breath of life, but his imagination was of the kind that abhorred a vacuum. Taking certain facts which he had seen correlated in his actual experience, he would pass them through his intelligence, plunge them into the great reservoirs of his emotion, and bring them forth again more real than reality itself. The greater artists dare more highly than this. They get their fundamental truths from life; and, having these touchstones, they build up their masterpieces by rearranging and not necessarily by accepting what they see. Charles Reade had not enough imagination for this. He was safe only in his workshop. There he could not go wrong. He had all his facts to hand. He had imagination enough to explain them, to quicken them into something more real; but his imagination faltered when he was asked to shape the bricks as well as to build the house. It was this quality of Charles Reade's mind that marked him out as the man to write the best historical novel in our language. Facts are facts, whether they be three hundred years old or as many minutes. Facts about hermits, after being transmuted in the brain and heart of Charles Reade, issued again to the light with as real and true a life of their own as facts about the contemporary prisonhouse. By the intensity of his imagination, and by its characteristic limitations, Charles Reade was born for the express purpose of breathing into the dry bones of a vanished period a life so convincing and so eternally true that criticism becomes almost impossible. This process of transmutation was not an easy one. Reading the letters he wrote from Oxford to Mrs. Seymour at the time he was writing "The Cloister and the Hearth," we catch him in the act and watch the mental agony it cost him. It will perhaps be well to make a selection from sentences that occur in the course of this correspondence: I think this story will wear my mind out. However, I see that if I had not read all about hermits and worked out these cards, this part of my story must have been all false. Good Heavens, how often have I been stuck! . . . I cannot tell whether it will succeed or not as a whole... but there shall be great and tremendous and tender things in it." In these vigorous sentences we see the whole process-the accumulation and intelligent rejection of material; and, finally, that giving out of himself by which he breathed upon it and gave to so much concrete matter its own peculiar life. Charles Reade, like many another, 'did not realize the nature of his genius or recognize the necessity under which he lay to work as he did. In the course of those very letters to Mrs. Seymour already quoted he writes: "God knows whether I am in the right path or not. Sometimes I think it must be dangerous to overload fiction with fact. At others I think fiction has succeeded better in proportion to the amount of fact in it." Now, with Charles Reade, fiction was fact touched with emotion. In his case the attempt to distinguish the two was useless. He was incapable, to any great extent, of the fiction which is a rearrangement of fact. He must have the fact itself, out of a record, a blue-book, or a newspaper. In "It is Never too Late to Mend" he describes scenes from Australian life. He had never been to Australia. Here then, it seems, was fiction with a vengeance. It was nothing of the sort. Had he actually been there, com |