when I tell you candidly that the arguments I have read and heard advanced in favor of the value and necessity of war are strikingly similar to those made a generation or two ago in favor of the value and necessity of slavery and the code. If any of you still believe in owning slaves and fighting duels, you are quite welcome to treat with amused indulgence or with positive scorn every statement made by me to-night. If, however, you believe that each generation finds baleful some institution or custom which former generations deemed indispensable and worthy of the most heroic defense, you will, I think, do well to follow the hint I have given, and compare the current methods of advocating war with the long-exploded methods of defending slavery and dueling and the subjection of women and religious persecution—in fact, the whole long list of evils from which the race, never without a heroic struggle, has at last freed itself, in whole or in part. And, if agreeing with me in considering fatuous and antiquated the arguments usually advanced in support of war-by which I mean, of course, offensive, not defensive, war-you are inclined to doubt whether so radical an evil can be exterminated within a reasonable period of time, I will simply ask you to refresh yourselves once more with the literature of dueling and slavery in this country, and then count on your fingers the number of years that elapsed between the publication of the most eloquent of the treatises you have perused and the abolition of the institution and custom. I do not think that you will need many hands to perform this feat of computation.

But, thank God! if the nineteenth century has its philsophy of war and its gospel of "Duty and Destiny," it is also not without its witnesses to the barbarism of war and the shallow folly of racial selfishness.

A much-criticised English poet in his most berated poem -Lord Byron in "Don Juan"-wrote about war in a way to be commended to those latter-day divines who implore the Almighty to smile upon deeds of carnage, holding apparently with the not infrequently stupid Wordsworth, whom

Byron satirized, that carnage is God's daughter-a bit of theogony that might have suited the ancient Hebrews, but is somewhat antiquated to-day. What Byron would have had to say about the hypocrisies of the closing years of a century whose opening decades he lashed with a power unparalleled in English literature since the days of Swift is something that can only be guessed at; yet, certain it is that few ages have needed a Byron to clear the atmosphere of cant more than our own does. For it is to be feared that only here and there in our Western world has an alert ear caught the eloquently pleading accents of the noblest voice of modern times-a voice which comes to us from that strange land where Orient and Occident meet-the voice of Count Leo Tolstoi. We listen to the shouts that acclaim a Dewey, or to the guffaws that mark the osculatory progress of a Hobson, or to the sordid political forecastings of a Hanna, or to the millennium mouthings of a Bryan, or to the cynical confessions of a Rhodes-and we are comparatively deaf to the gospel of a cosmopolitan peace preached by a Tolstoi. Dreamer, we call him; yes, one of those dreamers that are remembered by a grateful world when narrow-visioned men of action and thought, their laurel and bay wreaths faded, sleep in untended tombs. A dreamer; yes, and would that the latter-day literature of our Anglo-Saxon race -the race that has the proud and unique distinction of having given Shakspere and Milton to the world-should, in the eyes of every people, have proved its essential vitality by the right to lay claim to that grand old man whose visions of a redeemed and glorified world visit him there amid the Russian snows. But instead of a Tolstoi, we have whom? You may cast in what names you will, but you will never fill the gap, now that that other noble advocate of peace among the nations, William Ewart Gladstone, has gone to his grave, mourned by every man in the civilized world who has soul enough to rise above the petty prejudices of party and nation. Ah, yes, our nineteenth century has made greater advances than we are sometimes inclined to believe. It is not merely

the century of scientific and industrial marvels, and of phi-
lanthropic reforms; it is also the century of those two great
apostles of cosmopolitan brotherhood, Gladstone and Tols-
toi, and may I not add John Ruskin?—names that are truly
imperishable, names that will be remembered with gratitude
when victorious admirals and generals, and imperialist spoil-
ers of feeble peoples, and poets who pander to racial lust of
dominion shall have gone down to the oblivion that awaits
them when the true kingdom of God shall come to the long-
suffering tribes of men.
W. P. TRENT.

THE HAMADRYAD AND HER KINSFOLK.

The fair humanities of old religion,

The power, the beauty, and the majesty,

That had their haunt in dale, or piny mountain,

Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,

Or chasm and wat'ry depths; all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason!

But still the heart doth need a lauguage; still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names.

-Schiller's Wallenstein, Tr. by Coleridge.

THE children of the forest need no inspired poet to reveal for them the life that stirs and murmurs wherever they turn. Not only the owl and owlet, the squirrel and the rabbit, speak in a language Hiawatha is eager to master. The lapping water before the cabin door, the whispering pine tree, the faroff peak with ever-changing hood of clouds, are no less his fellow-creatures. This companionship is not evolved by a conscious effort of the imagination. Rather is it essential to our first impressions of this world. The pity is, that we ever unlearn a truth so potent: that this feeling of close sympathy, of life shared in common by all nature's offspring, should ever fade into the light of common day. Through all our life Baloo and Chibiabos should dwell with us, or we should return to them.

Almost any half-bred hound will meet certain death for his master's sake. What greater love hath any man? No gallant rider like John Brent will let us question the devoted affection between him and his horse. Nursemaids forget their charges, but the elephant nurse, never. Even Bianca and Lobo, the lame tiger and the red dog, are but the dearest foes of the man-child, to be fought fairly, and slain not without a half-regret, with due record of their valor. The gratitude of the sturdy tree, the forgiveness of the crushed violet, shame the thankless heart of man. Through all the long chain of forms, from the worm or the lichen up to our

selves, a certain consciousness of kin should clasp every link. Coleridge and Wordsworth, and nearly all our poets since, never weary of emphasizing this innate sympathy between Man and Nature. However difficult to defend and analyze in cold logical prose, every Platonist, at least, knows that such a faith helps us toward that unquestioning conviction of harmony and simple unity pervading the universe which is the goal of all self-culture.

Doubtless the savage grown-up holds, better than we, to the cruder material side of this childlike faith. Even his gods, indeed, often take gross bestial shapes, not to mention here the tree worship that has been so widely traced. The Hellene had much of the child, too much also of the savage, in himself, together with a far stronger impulse than ours toward adequate self-utterance in beautiful and enduring forms. Perhaps the combination of traits was a necessary one. Even now, whenever an artist is reincarnated among our more phlegmatic folk, whether he be painter or poet, musician, or myriad-gifted genius like William Morris, we still expect him to show more than his share of impulsive energy, of excited nervous life, of enthusiastic love for all beauty in nature or art; to be, in fact, his life long a child; for he retains what the rest of us, at best, lose too soon with the fading glow of the morning.

At any rate the Greek people, as a whole, were more than any other an artistic race. It was a passion, a necessity, to them, to curve the outline even of pots and jars in the true forms of simple beauty. Their costume, for man or maid, could fall only in waves of grace. All their handiwork seems to have the familiar human touch; and hence, throughout the arts of design, the shapes they created have survived, and have become the general possession of every cultured people. Above all, the myths of the world, those that have originated far away in West or East, or are so obvious that every dawn and spring suggests them afresh, these universal human tales are handed on in Greek forms, touched by the golden finger of Hellenic grace. The strug