The

istration is more hopelessly centralized than ever, and Hilmi Pasha, a clever but somewhat sinister figure, is a mere shadow of the Palace. He appears to be doing his best, as he did in the spring of 1903, to drive the Bulgarians once more into revolt. Troops are being quartered once more upon the villages-which means a daily round of robbery and oppression. A curfew ordinance has been re-enacted. whole public life of the Bulgarian communities stands suspended and suppressed. Their teachers are nearly all in exile, and practically all their schools are closed in consequence. A large number of their churches have been handed over to the Greek faction by the Turkish authorities-and that even in villages where the peasants of the Greek party are in a very small minority. Economically, save for the help that was rendered once this autumn in certain districts by the British Relief Fund, their case is still exceedingly miserable. The Turks, needless to say, have not made good their promise to rebuild the villages (12,000 houses in all) which were burned in 1903. In the Adrianople region the refugees have not yet been suffered to return, and their lands are still occupied by Turks. Finally, the Greek and Albanian bands which are making war upon the Bulgarians are tolerated, if not encouraged, by the Government, which is only too pleased to foster any feud among its Christian subjects. The general insecurity defies description, and the outlook for the immediate future is still blacker. With the coming of spring all the lawless bands are preparing to extend their activities, while the rigor of the authorities, not against the agitators but against the villagers, grows ever more stringent. It is an unbearable position, and if there comes no sign of a fresh European intervention before next spring an insurrection seems inevitable-and

insurrection spells massacre, outrage,

and devastation.

Her

It is quite futile to look for help to either of the interested Powers upon whom Europe in a moment of apathy conferred a mandate to pacify Macedonia. Russia is entirely preoccupied both at home and abroad. Austria has no policy except procrastination. Emperor is an intensely conservative force. Both the Germans and the Magyars are disposed to be Turcophil and to dread any movement of sympathy which might make them responsible for a large Slav population. And both Austria and Hungary are in the throes of Parliamentary crises. Of the other Powers, Germany stands aloof, and doubtless supports the Sultan behind the scenes. France is tied by the Russian Alliance. Italy is eager, but interested. There remains only England, at once free, disinterested, and sympathetic. We are pledged to action. In the past stands our overwhelming responsibility for the Treaty of Berlin, which flung Macedonia, rescued by Russian intervention, once more beneath the heel of the Turk. But we have also obligations of recent date. Lord Lansdowne has explicitly promised that if the Austro-Russian reforms should fail he will propose more drastic measures of amelioration. He is much too well informed, thanks to our excellent consular staff in Macedonia, to retain any illusions about the success of these reforms. That he has not forgotten his pledges is an assumption which his keen and altogether humane interest in this question warrants. The problem is how best to awaken the interest of the French Government and to bring it into line with Italy. In the autumn of 1903 Sir Edward Grey expressed the opinion that if even one other Power would support us, it was clearly our duty to intervene. There is no doubt that we could secure the co-operation of the Italian fleet if a

naval demonstration became neces

sary. Lord Lansdowne has himself indicated the programme which any serious Power must follow if it means to intervene with effect. It would no doubt be worth while merely to confer executive authority upon the European gendarmerie officers. But this would lead to endless conflicts with the Turkish Prefects and Governors. It would be useless to arrest criminals unless the courts were reformed. And to compel the Turks to pay the gendarmerie without reforming their whole financial system would simply mean that the The Speaker.

officials and the soldiers would receive less pay than ever, and there would be no money to repair the roads. Moreover, nothing short of a final solution will ever induce the Bulgarian or Greek bands to disarm or persuade the Turks to reduce the colossal army which lives upon the country. The Sultan would oppose serious reforms of detail as stoutly as he would fight any general and immediate remedy. The only satisfactory course is to nominate a European Governor independent of the Porte, endowed with full powers and responsible only to Europe.

!

The four hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Knox will occur in May. The Putnams will publish at that time the Knox volume in their Heroes of the Reformation series. The author is Professor Henry Cowan, D.D., of Aberdeen University.

G. P. Putnam's Sons are about publishing an English sociological work by L. T. Hobhouse, which should interest American students of social questions. The titles of such chapters as "The School of Cobden," "The Imperial Idea," "The Useful and the Right" pique curiosity.

Lovers and critics of art will welcome Sir Walter Armstrong's monograph upon "The Peel Collection and the Dutch School of Painting" of which E. P. Dutton & Co. are the American publishers. Taking as his theme the splendid collection brought together by the second Sir Robert Peel, in which were included fifty-five examples of the Dutch school and twelve of the Flemish, the author passes under review and treats with appreciation and sym

pathy the essential qualities of the Dutch artists. He especially combats the idea that Dutch painting is mere technique, taking as his text the somewhat dogmatic pronouncement to that effect in the first chapter of Ruskin's Modern Painters. The conclusion which he reaches is that the Dutch painters were as elemental artists as those of any other century, and that, although the nature which they chose to illustrate was inferior in beauty to that on which Titian and Giorgione embroidered their gorgeous decorations, no art may justly be condemned for the humbleness of its materials. The one weak point of the Dutch artists, in his view, is their incapacity to improve on the realities of external nature. The form chosen for the volume is a large, slender octavo, which admits not only of an ample and legible page for the letter-press but of the reproduction upon an adequate scale of some of the most striking examples of the Dutch school of art. Of these there are four photogravures, and twenty-four other full-page illustrations.

It is in the spring-time, the far-famed cherry-blossom time, when all Japan makes holiday beneath spacious canopies of pink and white bloom, or a little later, when the giant wistarias display their hanging mauve trusses, while irises, tree-peonies and azaleas create a riot of color in the land, or else in autumn, after rains and storms have passed away and the woods are arrayed in scarlet and gold, that the everincreasing army of tourists from the West is wont to overrun these pleasant Eastern resorts, testifying to its appreciation thereof in the shrill, nasal, or guttural accents of the divers nationalities which it represents. During the summer, travellers, save such as are bound for the mountains, are warned off from Japan by the guide-books. July and August are months of oppressive, damp heat and frequent rains; flowers, except the lotus, are few at that season, and the mosquito is a burden.

However, seasons vary, and on this *Written in 1903.

brilliant August day there is no rain nor sign of any in dusty Tokyo-has been none, they say, for weeks past. The Genza, that wide main thoroughfare of the Mikado's capital, with its incongruous tramcars and multitudinous perspiring foot-passengers, is baking and shimmering in the heat; the untiring little jinrikisha-man in the shafts, whose white mushroom hat goes bobbing along on a level with your feet as you sit beneath a sun umbrella, has to mop his brow continually, though he never relaxes his pace; the masons, busy over their work of demolition and deplorable reconstruction, have discarded all the clothing that can be decently discarded in a city so bent upon becoming European in aspect and habit. The transmogrifying process is being carried out only too rapidly and thoroughly. Everywhere the old wooden houses, with their overhanging tiled roofs, are coming down, to be replaced by meaningless, unsuitable, flimsy structures of brick and stucco; Europe, or rather America, is being re

produced here with a fidelity as unflattering as a photograph to the commonplace original. The transition effect is depressing. It does not, somehow, seem to imply progress, or at least not progress in the right direction. One has the impression (wrongly perhaps, yet unavoidably) of a vulgar degeneration. Happily, Japan is a land of almost incessant earthquakes.

For the rest, it is easy, and does not take very long, to escape from the dust and noise and bustle of the streets to the seclusion of the Shiba Park, where, girdled by overarching trees and enclosed by rotting black palings, are the mortuary temples of the Tokugawa Shoguns, who for two centuries and a half ruled Japan from the old Yedo, which has not yet been completely converted into new Tokyo. Here at least one has no sense of change, beyond that wrought by lapse of time, stress of destructive weather, and, unfortunately, lack of care. For the shrines of the Shoguns are not much frequented, and the priests in charge are said to be poor-so much so that repairs are visibly neglected. But the work of the patient, laborious artists who adorned these temples, into the twilight of which one penetrates through courts filled with the customary stone lanterns, is virtually imperishable. Employing only the very best materials, they could brave decay. Gold lacquer may have been a little rubbed here and there, colors may have faded somewhat; but the exquisite wood-carving remains sharp and clear, the metals and crystals and inlaying cannot crumble away. Here we have the last word of decorative art; not to be surpassed, nor ever again, one surmises, to be equalled; for never and nowhere again, if an ephemeral denizen of this hurried, narrowed world may venture to prophesy, will such years recur as those in which Japan, closed against foreigners and self-sufficing. could

carry out tasks in hand with so fine a disregard of the pecuniary value of the passing hours.

Of course, such conscientious finish of minutest detail does not make for general effect. Here, as everywhere in Japan, there is a suggestion of disdain for facile ostentation, a hint of secrecy, mystery, dignified reserve, characteristic of a people whose habitations are of the barest simplicity, whose treasured possessions are exhibited only to those who can appreciate them, whose elaborate and charming courtesy veils one knows not what sentiments, opinions, aims. If you wish to enjoy the beauties of the Shiba temples you must look for them, and look rather closely in that semi-darkness. Yet the general effect, whether designedly or not, is there: an effect at once glorious and mournful, which fitly commemorates departed rulers and an abolished system of rule. It is very quiet and still among these shrines and tombs; the clop, clop of wooden clogs is heard only at intervals in the courts that surround them; the hum of the living city comes but faintly and fitfully upon the breeze which sets the leaves overhead rustling; the one persistent sound is the peculiar dirge-like croakAh! ah! ah!-of ravens, hovering always above the temple roofs.

Ravens are long-lived birds, and to be old is to be conservative. If they lament the vanished magnificences of Ieyasu and his successors, of feudal daimyos and attendant samurai, of a civilization which needed not to borrow or imitate, unless from that neighboring civilization on the mainland whence it took its start, possibly they may have some human congeners in this abruptly revolutionized country. Possibly, and, one would imagine, probably; although there is not much to confirm conjecture in that direction. Something in the nature and genius of the race-patriotism, perhaps, or the