been constructed to the head of the equatorial forests, steamers mavigate the rivers, the post and telegraph operate, hospitals have been established, and governmental administration proceeds effectively in that vast territory."

The report has met with a varied reception from the press. The German papers, to whom the difficulties of African roadmaking are well known, while they are too wise, perhaps, to throw stones when glass is so near, summarize without criticism the report. The Frankfurter Zeitung says in a very characteristic tone:

'There is no doubt that the report issued by the Kongo commissioners, appointed under pressure from England, is of extraordinary and far-reaching interest. The members of the Commission have done full justice to the young African State; they praise and admire the development of the country, the fairness with which the Government is carried on, and the revenue collected. The administration of justice is honorable and equitable. With regard to the mutilation of natives by cutting off hands, etc., such as the English missionaries have seen, no testimony, direct or indirect, points, they say, to the guilt of any white man in the matter. . Do not France, England, Germany know of similar incidents and similar charges arising in their own colonies?"

The Independance Belge (Brussels) naturally claims complete impartiality for the Commission, and accepts its word for every -detail, particularly dwelling on the praise it gives to the work of Leopold; but admits that there have been some failures and weakmesses in the administration of the colony. The Etoile Belge (Brussels) observes:

guage the London Times, after mentioning the suggestions of the Commission and the fact that the King of the Belgians has appointed a board to carry them out, adds:

"We shall look forward hopefully to the reforms which it will be the duty of the new Commission to recommend and of the Administration to enforce. But the responsible authorities, whether in Belgium or in Africa, must be warned that any partial excuses which may be found for them in the past must mainly rest upon the difficulties inseparable from the task which was set before them, and that any attempt either to shelve the report or to shrink from giving full effect to its recommendations would call down upon them the unanimous condemnation, not of this country alone, but of the whole of the civilized world."

According to The Evening Standard and St. James's Gazette (London) Leopold is being imposed upon by his Commission. This journal declares:

'King Leopold has been 'sold' by his workmen. After the report of the Commission, he can hardly wriggle out of the shameful truth, or avoid his manifest duty. Perhaps rumor has from time to time exaggerated the horrors; but we now know plainly that when we heard what seemed fantastic tales of wanton and uncivilized savagery we were listening to the truth. The administration of the Kongo Free State has obviously been a medieval blot on the page of modern history. It must be erased, and fair writing must take its place. This Kongo business has been as slippery as an eel, as venomous as a snake. Now that the eel has been secured the snake must be killed. In no spirit of complacent superiority we are entitled to warn King Leopold that the twentieth century can not tolerate such abuses. It is for him to avenge the past in reorganizing the future. But it is for the civilized world (and especially for us as pioneers in colonial government and champions of justice and humanity) to support very strenuously the immediate steps which King Leopold can not hesitate to take to put an end to scandals and horrors that are now beyond the pale of doubt."

The London Morning Standard, however, sums up in the clearest way the general verdict of English-speaking people who profess to have had some of the best opportunities of learning the truth. Leopold, King of the Belgians, is to be held responsible, according to this influential organ, for all the atrocious injustices and bloody mutilations perpetrated, as Mr. Morel has over and over again shown, by the Belgians of the Kongo Free State. Magistrates, soldiers, tax-collectors, and rubber manufacturers have persistently treated the Kongo blacks with diabolical cruelty. Compulsion, we are informed, is to be applied to Leopold by the united Powers of Europe if he delays, on any pretext, to carry out the obvious reforms suggested by his Commission and inaugurate a reign of justice and humanity in the Kongo. England is ready to lead in compelling the King of Belgium to take the right course, says this paper. Its words are as follows:

4

"The Kongo is, indeed, full of cruel habitations,' and the warmest praise is due to Mr. E. D. Morel, the honorary secretary of the Kongo Reform Association, through whose unremitting exertions and self-sacrifice this welter of abomination has been brought to light. The blame must lie at the door of Leopold, King of the Belgians, and, by guarantee of Europe, sovereign of the Kongo Free State. Europe placed in the hands of that monarch, in return for the right of amassing great profits, the duty of securing to his native subjects the privileges of civilized government. He has availed himself to the full of the right, while utterly neglecting the duty. Europe must now step in to compel its fulfilment, and we trust that Great Britain will lead the way. Else Europe will become partaker in the misdeeds of the Kongo Government. The iniquities of the local administration are proved up to the hilt. Either the head Government under King Leopold can not compel decent behavior on the part of its emissaries, or, thanks to greed of gain, it will not. In either case, the guarantors of the State have the last word, and it is imperative that it should speedily be spoken. Otherwise the mission of Europe, to give freedom and justice to the barbarous tribes of the world, becomes a mockery and a sarcasm." Translations made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

MR. BALFOUR'S SPEECH OF DESPAIR TO THE UNEMPLOYED,

THE

HE English press in general speak with bitterness of the helplessness of the "one man who under the British Constitution is responsible for the situation" when to the unemployed thousands he announced his inability to help them. Mr. Balfour's resignation is hourly expected, but we are told that his words of despair were heard with indignation, and many say that free trade, which hands over the work of the English unemployed to foreigners, is the secret of the disastrous state of the London labor market, and that it is "up to the Prime Minister" to find ways to remedy the condition of things which forces men, women, and children to come clamoring for work and bread at the door of the Government offices.

The London Times thus describes the gathering:

"The demonstration was, perhaps, the most striking and significant of the kind that has been held in London for several generations. The women who composed the greater part of it belonged, obviously, to the poorer classes. The bulk of them were the wives of navvies, dockers, and casual laborers generally, and the pinch of poverty and hunger, brought about by the unemployment of their husbands, could easily be traced in their dress and in their white and drawn faces. A large number of the women carried babies in their arms. The alternative was to stay at home and lose their share, for whatever it was worth, in what they understood was to be a great occasion. The absence of several hundreds of women who had been expected to take their place in the ranks was accounted for by their acceptance of this alternative. Many of the mothers led children of very tender years by the hand, while others were fortunate enough to get their young ones accommodated in one of the three carts which brought up the rear of the procession." Mr. Balfour met this delegation at the express command of King Edward and addressed them in a speech, in which he gave them

the alleviation of their sufferings to some degree. He concluded as follows:

"I should hope that under the Act which the Government passed last session, imperfect tho it may be-imperfect, indeed, as I think it is, for I personally preferred the measure in its old shape-but under that Act, with the aid of the public spirit and the generosity of those who themselves belong to the metropolis, although they do not live in the East End among the sufferers whose cause you have. come here to plead today-I do not believe that the bill, so aided, will not do something materially, something lasting, if not to put an

end to, at least to mitigate, a state of distress which I can most truly assure those whom I am addressing the Government recognize, acknowledge, and deplore, and which, as far as they are severally and collectively concerned, they will do everything in their power to mitigate."

WILL CROOKS, M.P. Who, after Balfour's speech to the workingmen's delegates, expressed his disgust and indignation at the helplessness of the ministry.

Mr. W. N. Crooks, M.P., who, with his wife, headed the procession, in expressing his disappointment at the Prime Minister's non possumus, moved a resolution which was enthusiastically carried. As reported in The Times he proposed this resolution in a speech in which he said that no one was more full of hope than he was when he went to the Local Government Board. He could not realize that a man like the Prime Minister would have been guilty of delivering a speech of despair such as he had delivered to the deputation. Practically he had said, "What can I do?" The whole speech was unworthy of even a two-penny-halfpenny statesman. The resolution was as follows: "This mass-meeting of women, having heard the result of the deputation to Mr. Balfour, expresses its profound indignation at the hopeless and ineffectual reply of the Prime Minister, and pledges itself to continue to organize and work until the Government does provide men who are workless and are ready to work with employment."

The London Daily News makes a rather scathing comment on this incident and speaks as follows:

"After his reply, Mr. Balfour was addressed by Mr. Crooks in terms which no deputation has dared to use in the past toward the first Minister of the Crown. Here at last was an occasion where the truth went home to both sides. On the one side of the table stood a company of desperate and miserable poor. On the other side of the table stood the one man who, under the British Constitution, is responsible for dealing with such a situation. The cry of the unhappy deputation was met by a simple, cruel, unmistakable non possumus. For once, Mr. Balfour was lucidity itself. He could do nothing for the unemployed, and he said so. He sent away these thousands of victims of social injustice without one ray of hope or of comfort. They are, in fact, to be left to waste away by hunger-they, their wives, and their children-such is Mr. Balfour's definite and inexorable conclusion."

Mrs. Crooks in an interview with a representative of the London Standard is reported to have said:

"We are bitterly disappointed. Mr. Balfour has promised us practically nothing. If the Government only knew of the hunger, poverty, and degradation among the unemployed they would do

something. It is in Mr. Balfour's hands, next to the King's, to help us, and whom have we to look to except Parliament?"

The London Times says that Mr. Balfour was obliged to reject the facile remedies" proposed by Mr. Crooks and his adherents, and adds that the real cause of the present distress is free trade, by which the work that should be done in London is executed in Berlin. To quote :

"The State could without difficulty put our labor upon equal terms with labor in other countries, and then the qualities of our workmen would have fair play. But the Liberal party is going to die in its last ditch rather than listen to a proposal which sets at naught some theories propounded sixty years ago. So we give our real employment to foreigners and then have to face the demandwhich after all is not without an element of justice-that we should make good its absence by inventing and paying for sham employment.'

The same paper deprecates all artificial attempts to give work to the unemployed and practically echoes Mr. Balfour's statement when it says:

"It may be hoped.. that no political party will lend itself to propagating or promoting the fallacy of national workshops, or give any countenance to the theory that the State is bound to attempt the ruinous and impossible task of finding work for all those whose work is unsalable. All that the community can do in this direction is to aid in organizing and encouraging such work of an economically sound character as may be found undone and yet doable by better organization. The work must pay, otherwise the wages are only disguised Poor Law relief upon an extravagant scale and in a most demoralizing form."

The Standard editorially condemns the tone of the Prime Minister's speech and declares:

We think he took a wrong and a narrow view of his duty; that he missed the chance which, perhaps, comes to a statesman only once in his lifetime, and thereby has committed his party to a course which, we are convinced, it does not approve, but the odium of which it can not escape."

The Saturday Review (London) taunts Mr. Balfour for dosing the unemployed with "Scotch philosophy," and remarks of the Premier's utterance:

"It was described by one of the deputation as a speech of despair. This was not the real note of it, but rather a want of appreciation of the seriousness of the question. Mr. Balfour after many expressions of sympathy dealt with the matter in a dilettante spirit and indulged himself in a dry criticism, in which there was neither reality nor earnestness. Nothing could have been more incongruous than such a speech made to such an assembly."

PARISIAN COMPLIMENTS TO A RESIGNING

THE

MINISTER.

HE news of riot, of famine, and of social and political distress and disorder that fills the columns of other European newspapers directs attention, by contrast, to the French press, which mirrors a country that "has no annals." With Russia in the throes of a great upheaval, with Austria-Hungary facing the worst crisis it has known in recent times, with Germany in the grip of a meat famine, with England helplessly witnessing great parades of the unemployed, and with the Scandinavian peninsula rent with political dissension, France can find no more exciting topic to discuss than a cabinet minister who was rude enough to accentuate his resignation by stamping out of the Chamber of Deputies and slamming the door! This "pettish exit" of Mr. Berteaux, the Minister of War, instead of exciting admiration or sympathy, seems to have had just the opposite effect. As the Parisian press describe it, this "vulgar adventurer" acted like a "spoiled child." He" made a scene," talked like a "buffoon"; then when the division displeased him, threw down his portfolio on his chair, made "a

MR. BERTEAUX,

"All the world knew that he did not intend his rise to greatness to end there. He had his eye fixed on something far more exalted, and the presidency of the republic was the final dream of an ambition which he promoted by numberless intrigues."

The millionaire Minister of War, who resigned in a "huff," because of an unfavorable division.

The Figaro (Paris) accuses the ex-Minister of War of an attempt to overturn the Rouvier cabinet, and remarks that "this revolutionary millionaire, with his insatiable lust for power," has "made a miserable shipwreck" of his career. It proceeds in the following terms to accuse him of almost every political crime in so resigning his office:

This small piece of villainy he has executed with all the theatrical posing, all the silly buffoonery, which he knows how to trot out on every occasion. To the last hour of his dangerous period of office he has exhibited his true character and practised his unceasing imposture for the promotion of an ambition which nothing can satisfy."

This accusation is repeated by the Gaulois (Paris) in the following terms:

"He expected to bring about an immediate ministerial crisis, and to overthrow Rouvier by a blow craftily aimed at him from behind. The stroke miscarried; Mr. Rouvier still stands his ground. It is Berteaux himself who has fallen into the ditch. 'The enginer hoist with his own petard!' an old proverb, which finds here a new, and we may say, a most happy illustration. Mr. Berteaux banged the doors behind him, but the republic did not seem to be shaken at his exit."

The last howl or sigh of this tempest in a teapot appears in the Soleil (Paris), which thus accuses the ex-Minister of designing to sell France to Germany:

"We demand a soldier as the successor of this mischievous bucket-shop operator, whom the spirit of internationalism had set up as Minister of War in order that he might giv France over into the clutches of William II."-Translations made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

of them all) a novelist of to-day is quite willing to announce himself or herself as the author of a "labor" novel.

Two clever new novels dealing with this problem of master and man appear in the fall book lists. Both, strangely enough, are written by women, rather than men. Both purport to deal in fair temper with the interests of employer and employed. Each, placed in the Middle West, hinges upon the episode of a "strike," and each condemns the striker and upholds the strikebreaker. A third book, "the true story of a New York working-girl as told by herself," shows, in this case at least, that fact may be more interesting than fiction.

OCTAVE THANET.

"The Grapple," by Grace MacGowan Cooke, is the story of the owner of a mine in contest with a force of miners. This owner, once a man with the pick, has risen to be the man with the payroll. Having a practical knowledge of mining matters and an inside experience in strikes, he makes a notable success of his superintendency till there comes a clash with the Miners' Union. In this break the superintendent takes his stand upon the ground that he owes it to himself to run his business in any way he sees fit; something of a fallacy, however, for Mr. Mark Strong; for let any man try to run a business past the limit of the law, and he is soon stopped with a jerk, and shown that he does not run his business to please himself alone, but also to please the public. And this protective barrier, one might add, has been built up against unjust encroachments by the public demand.

Strong is rather a lovable and humane man. His cause, however, would have been strengthened had he done his "Golden-Rule-Jones" acts from the start, for the benefit of his white laborers, his old-time fellow laborers-had he begun his building and running of a fair-price store; his fitting up of a restaurant with pure food and drinks at cost; his laying out of a park and drilling of a band of musicians. But his philanthropy seems rather an afterthought, as he waits to organize those progressive ideas until, after the crucial strike, his white men go out, and he brings in a swarming stockade of blacks to run his mine.

We leave Strong standing pat against the union, a dead line" around his place, and all the vexed labor questions still unsettled.

In Octave Thanet's "The Man of the Hour" we have the story of a rich man's son who turns from a romantic attempt to cast his lot with the working people just in time to save the family property from the violence of strikers. The boy, sprung from the marriage of an ardent Russian princess with revolutionary ideas and a practical American manufacturer, inherits a temperamental unevenness-a Russian imagination, struggling with a Puritan sense of duty. His mother instils into her sympathetic child her own spirit of revolt at the social injustices of the world. He flings his life and fortune into the cause of labor and becomes the magnetic center of a great strike. But the problem is too big; there are blunders, there are villainies, and his fine enthusiasm begins to ooze away. The conventional business man in him rises uppermost of the poet and reformer. Tradition, society, family-all the influences about him tend to draw him back to the orthodox, comfortable routine. He comforts himself with the easy optimism: "The real way to better the condition of working-men is to make better workers of them. They have now taken about all they can of the share of their employers." We leave John Winslow, once crying the right and duty of workingmen to band together for the common good, now in his father's factory battling against the efforts of banded workers, smuggling in "scabs,' and calling out the militia. But we feel that in the evolution of a business man we have seen the deadening of an altruistic, Christ-like spirit. Both novels have a crisp, eye-on-the-object literary style, and deal in philosophy easily followed, however large the issues at stake. Octave Thanet pitches her book upon a more fashionable level of society than does Mrs. Cooke. One instinctively recognizes in Octave Thanet an

arm's length, patronizing attitude toward the grimy, sweaty workingman-an attitude unintentional, but none the less palpable. Mrs. Cooke's feeling seems more compassionate for those "who delve in the cold and dark that others may sit warm in the light." Octave Thanet is at her best in depicting children. She loves them in any rank of life, and gets them on paper in all their whimsicality, their straight-to-themark directness, their consistent inconsistency.

In "The Long Day" the story is told by a girl who is both spectator and worker, a country girl, who, to earn her living at the age of eighteen, worked in New York for $3 a week, and suffered and nearly starved; but was seeing as well as working, and always with intelligence and a marvelously wide outlook and a profoundly logical brain. As the writer most cogently puts it, the average factory girl can not work and does not work; she is simply worked. To work is a boon and a privilege; to be worked is degrading." The false sentiment expressed so frequently about the American working-girl is, according to this book, largely responsible for the girl's false attitude toward her work. To slight work has become an ideal of refinement. Each girl is her own heroine, and during working hours she is not listening for orders, but for the footsteps of King Cophetua.

The writer had the advantage of doing her book from necessity through the terrible hardships of the sweatshop existence. She did not "visit" the shops for literary purposes. She came to New York without friends, influence, or money, because there was a "new-made grave on a windswept hill in western Pennsylvania."

And so she started hunting for work, using her last precious pennies to answer advertisements and to pay carfare from factory to factory. She tramped for weeks, often wet and sick, always tired and hungry. She met every discouragement, every impertinence, every covert insolence that the shabby, poverty-stricken girl who doesn't know how to work must meet in the lower East Side. She went to cheaper and cheaper lodging-houses, and met there the cruelty and the unkindness that seem inevitable where philanthropy is the half-source of a working-girl's home. She found in the factory district the money paid for the longest sort of hours for a green hand was seldom more than $2.50 a week, and, badly as she was living, it was costing her $4. Still, it was work or starve, and by a stroke of luck she at last started in in a flower sweatshop that actually paid as high as $3 a week to a beginner. In this shop she lost forever any sentimental ideas about the "beauty of labor" and the "charm of independence" to be found in the American metropolitan work-girl's life. She learned to the dregs the false standards of play and work, of joy and sorrow of these girls, their enjoyment of tawdry books, worse jokes, false sentiment in plays, jeers for kindness and goodness. She saw the appalling evil that the word equality has worked, the vividness of class hatred mixed with insatiable curiosity about the hated class, the cheerful acceptance of insolent familiarity from men for the sake of promotion, and always, 'everywhere, the intention to give the least and poorest work that could win any financial

return.

Not that she did not meet kindness. When the women about her could obliterate any sense of mental or social difference, some of them gave her sympathy, some help, and some crude advice that she should more closely imitate their ways. Out of three years' experience she found at one shop girls who were gentle to each other and to her, who were proud of doing good work, who were thoughtful of their speech, who were interested in the better things of the world, whose ideal of success was not entirely mercenary, and whose ethical point of view was not wholly a medley of the sentiment of music-hall songs and yellow books. This she attributed to the unusual personality of the forewoman, who, with great sweetness of character and bigness of heart, drew to her the better class of working-girls, and made them better day by day.

GRACE MACGOWAN COOKE.

However, at the end of her three years' terrible battle for life in the factory slums, her help came from a working-girl, or perhaps a girl rather nearer the professional lines, who nursed her back to health and found for her an opening to more profitable and more congenial work. Then, by great patience, pluck, and perseverance, she learned how to work, and when "The Long Day" was finally suggested by a New York editor, she was earning $20 a week as a stenographer.

A book written with so much understanding and insight would not be complete without the suggestion born of experience of some remedy for the betterment of the enormous waste material in New York known as the working-girl.

"We have," to quote the summing-up in the last chapter, "a crying

need for two things.

We need a well-regulated system of boardingand lodging-houses, where we can live decently upon the small wages we receive. . . . There must be no semblance of charity, and no rules and regulations that are not in operation at the Waldorf or the St. Regis. The curse of such attempts in the past has been coercive morality."

The other need is for a greater interest on the part of the Church, and an effort by this all-powerful institution to bring about some adjustment of the working-girls' social and economic difficulties. The Church can, she concludes, "be the greatest good to this great army of women marching hopelessly on, ungeneraled, untrained, and, worst of all, uncaring."

Turning to the opinion of the critics, the Boston Herald declares that "The Man of the Hour" is "decidedly the American novel of the year"; and the Chicago Record-Herald says that "the novel is one that you can't lay down till it is finished." It is "fine in spirit and thoroughly readable," says The Outlook. The Philadelphia Press, however, finds its construction so faulty that "the narrative is lacking in impulse and the reader's interest is allowed to flag"; and The Independent observes that "the latter half of the book is stuffed with not very enlightening discussions of labor problems, and it ends in an absurdly conventional way." The press, generally, have a good word to say for "The Grapple." Among those that consider it favorably are The Times Saturday Review, the New York Evening Post, the Brooklyn Eagle, the Boston Herald, the Chicago News, the Cleveland Leader. the Philadelphia Ledger and the Detroit Free Press. The Times Saturday Review says: "If read by the captains of industry and the leaders of labor, one would think it could hardly fail of the beneficent mission of helping each to understand the other " The Interior (Chicago), however, observes that this book "demonstrates the ability of a clever author gracefully to go beyond her depth and buoyantly float out again without especially exciting any The story, we are told further, "neither thrills nor solves nor even thrusts any original economic theories upon the reader."

one

As for "The Long Day," the Washington Star calls it "one of the really significant books on modern social problems," and many other papers give it high praise. "I would rather have written 'The Long Day' than 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,"" declares Miss Gertrude Barnum, national secretary of the Women's Trade-Union League; and Jack London, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, says that "it should be read by every man, woman, and child who cherishes the belief that he or she is not a selfish clod." The New York Globe remarks half-skeptically, however: "That the experiences described are actual, there will be no doubt, altho it is more than probable they are the result of a clever and courageous sociological experiment rather than a necessitous attempt to earn a livelihood."

CROCKETT CLANKS THE SWORDS AGAIN. THE CHERRY RIBBAND. By S. R. Crockett. Cloth, 410 pp. Price, $1.50. A. S. Barnes & Co., New York.

CROM

ROCKETT has at last returned to his early methods of story telling and "The Cherry Ribband" is a thrilling drama-novel of the joyous old type of Dumas and Hope-and Crockett. It is a thousand miles away from the problem story, and the story with a motive, and the still more recent innovation in fiction, the story that jeers in

epigrammatic numbers. "The Cherry Ribband" is a literary melodrama. Of course, you know that two young people at two different times could not jump over the same high and dangerous cliff into deep and usually fatal waters and both be rescued by the same brave fisherman, even tho they were in love (which enables many people to do many extravagant things in safety) and good and brave and misunderstood; yet you thrill with delight reading of these hazardous deeds as Crockett tells them. And they seem very real and very convincing, and you are quite as breathless over these adventurous ways as Crockett intends you to be, and as every wholesome person longs to be over a story of love and daring every now and then. There are fearsome episodes, a half-dozen or more in every chapter, and the clanking of swords alternating with soft glances, and villains drowned, and maidens borne swiftly away on gaily caparisoned steeds. The days of Charles II. in Scotland saw the doing of many doughty deeds, none of which apparently escaped the keen dramatic eye of Crockett. But "The Cherry Ribband" is not all a tale of the warring of knights and the love of sweet girls. The conflicts between Whig and Tory, Covenanter and Royalist, are vividly set forth; for is not the hero, Raith Ellison, the youngest son of a sturdy, blind, bitterly protesting

S. R. CROCKETT.

Covenanter, disowned because of his love for the daughter of the captain of His Majesty's Dragoons-a fine, brave, stern old captain, who in his turn falls in love and fights with the blue snood of a Covenanter girl tied. to his sword-hilt.

Of course such complications as these between political parties and lovers bring about innumerable vivid dramatic situations that seem impossible to adjust, as when Raith finds himself guarding in a cruel royal prison his father and two brothers, or when later he is caught in a wolf trap behind the panels of an old chateau, with the maniac owner outlining his body on the floor with bullet holes; or during the siege of the Covenanters by the Laird of Lag, when the captain of the Dragoons fights for his old enemies because of the blue snood on his sword. But Crockett is a kind providence, and knows how to make people live happy ever after.

Mr. Crockett's tale "is one of the best," in the opinion of the New York Tribune, and the Brooklyn Eagle and the Boston Congregationalist both agree that the book "is wholly delightful." The New York Sun, however, declares that "too much is crowded upon us."

ASPECTS OF BALSAC.

ΤΗ

BALZAC FOR BABES.

By W. H. Helm. Pp. 206. Price, $1 net. James Pott

& Co., New York. HIS lively and entertaining volume is not addressed to students or ardent admirers of Balzac; but to a very large class who have neither the time nor intention to go into a laborious cult of Balzac for themselves, it will be a prize. It contains entertaining information about the novelist and his novels, presented in a clear, direct, offhand manner, which agreeably does not exact too much patience from the reader. In more than one respect Mr. Helm finds fault with Balzac's method. His interminable "didactic preparation," long historical disquisitions, minute descriptions of his characters and their environments are, he declares, intolerably tedious. They are excusable from the point of view of the author, he concedes, whose aim was not merely to write novels, but to give a correct history of the people of his epoch. Those who have the forbearance to follow him to the end, however, concedes Mr. Helm, will be rewarded. In two of the sections we find brief summaries of all Balzac's principal works, and it must be admitted that the effect of this lumping together of bare epitomes of stories, which thus seem mostly to show wickedness and depravity, is repellant. Is this the fault of the novelist or of his critic? A normal, healthy reader, in search of entertainment, would scarcely be tempted by these summaries to plunge into the study of the French language for the purpose of reading Balzac. Many of his characters seem flagrant types of abnormal and petty immorality. The best among them feed upon illicit passion or frivolous ambition. Perhaps the unsavory theme is emphasized a little by Mr. Helm's treatment; and he thus, by implication, attracts attention to that fundamental limitation of most French novelists-their inability to conceive and depict noble human types, whether in splendid triumph or tragic aberration.

As to the literary tastes and proclivities of the great Balzac, these would be considered out of date by the critics of this irreverent and fas tidious age. According to Mr. Helm, his favorite authors were Richard-son, Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Sterne, and Byron. Balzac speaks of "Clarissa Harlowe" as a "magnificent poem," and models his own work on that of the master. The author compares Balzac with Dickens, and points out various qualities in which a certain resemblance may be discerned. Personal incidents in the life of Balzac are touched upon, and are at least amusing, if not of deep significance. Overwhelmed with debts, distracted by pecuniary difficulties, the great genius was always planning to make an immense fortune. One of his schemes, tho he made nothing of it, might be splendidly successful in this commercial age. It was "to open a grocer's shop, to which his presence behind the counter would attract innumerable customers." But his friends regarded these various schemes as the follies of a man in whom the artistic temperament abounded, and ridiculed them. He, himself a "lord of irony," was in sober earnest, and the author of the "Comédie Humaine" only regretted that life was too short for the accomplishment of every kind of activity. The Chicago Evening Post says: "There is nothing very new or very profound in the book, but if one knows the Comédie Humaine it is agreeable to read these sensible, discursive essays."

A CORRESPONDENT in The Evening Post discusses the question of how many words a man can remember-that is to say, how many convey a distinct and accurate meaning without the necessity of referring to the dictionary. He believes that most persons in literary or scientific pursuits carry in their memory from 30,000 to 37,000 English words. He adds: "The vast and varied literature contained in the Bible is recorded with only 7,209 words. A Milton concordance shows 17,377, and a Shakespeare concordance 24,000 words. Inevitably, the increasing knowledge and varied interests of the present age will tend to the enlargement of the personal vocabulary."