est both childish performers and an audience of their friends. The interpolated element is managed with especial grace, and the whole play evinces that delicate imagination and that deep sympathy with childhood which we have learned to look for in Miss Peabody's verse. Everywhere it is sweet and graceful, and in places it reaches a high spiritual level. Houghton Mifflin Co. Dr. James Stalker of Aberdeen has made more than one important contribution to the literature of theology, but he has given his readers nothing more luminous, more forceful or more inspiring than his latest volume, "The Ethic of Jesus." Taking the synoptic Gospels as the basis of his study, he has analyzed and grouped the teachings of Jesus touching the highest good, the summum bonum of the ancient philosophers,-the animating force by which the goal is to be attained, and the path along which it is to be sought. Not to impose his own views or theories upon the reader, but to study the teachings of the Master and to draw from them lessons needed for to-day is Dr. Stalker's aim; and he pursues it through chapter after chapter of limpid and reverent prose, with a simplicity of style, which engages and holds the attention of a lay reader, while the sincere and searching scholarship evinced must command the respect of the professional theologians. The argument is closely knit, and the book will yield the best results to a reader who follows the author's thought from the first chapter to the last,- -a task by no means onerous, and richly repaying the time required; but to readers who must read by snatches, separate chapters, such as those on "Repentance," "The Imitation of Christ" and "The Cross and Offences" will bring a quickened sense of the meaning of Je sus in passages which, by reason of their familiarity, have lost a part of their compelling appeal. A. C. Armstrong & Son. What is as deceitful as a fashion plate? Another fashion plate. Even to-day, although one may accept the photographs distributed by certain dressmakers as perfectly representing the garments which they send forth, all moderately well-informed persons know that every artist who draws fashion figures endows each one with her own temperament and produces puppets as far from reality as so many Gibson girls. Therefore conditionally and conditionally only one accepts the pictures in Miss M. Edwardes's "Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century." The three volumes describe the period between 1790 and 1878. By comparison and elimination one may guess what was really worn, and the best French plates are often as accurate as photographs. Accordingly a general impression of the procession of the modes may be drawn from the book and that is valuable, and the pictures taken individually are very interesting. The modern portraits are excellent, being photographs, and among them is a rare picture of King Edward just before his marriage. The text is a composite photograph rather than a succession of portraits that one perceives in it, and one is not shown how one style develops from its predecessor. One is not even told the originator of some garments having historical significance. One begins in the England of Queen Charlotte and comes down to the England on which the jersey will dawn the next summer, but between the two points confusion reigns. One must be content with admiring the oddity of the old styles, and the patience which has gathered the pictures. The beautiful little volumes amuse if they do not edify. E. P. Dutton & Co. 1. Belgium and the Reforms on the Congo. By Emile Vandervelde. CONTEMPORARY REVIEW 131 As It Happened. Book V. The Chances of the Sea. Chapter I. Ter- Lord Halifax to His Daughter. (To be continued.) 142 BLACK WOOD'S MAGAZINE 153 An Experiment in Growing Alpines. By A. C. Bartholemew 165 In and Out of Parliament. By Ian Malcolm CORNHILL MAGAZINE (Concluded.) BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE 170 VII. The Ring of Faustus. By Eugene Lee-Hami ton 130 FOR SIX DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage, to any part of the United States. To Canada the postage is 50 cents per annum. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office or express money order if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, express and money orders should be made payable to the order of THE LIVING AGE Co. Single Copies of THE LIVING AGE, 15 cents. BELGIUM AND THE REFORMS ON At this moment, when there is in England a movement for the defence of the natives of the Congo which recalls in extent the humanitarian campaigns of former days against slavery and the slave trade, it may be interesting to give the point of view of a Belgian who is in pursuit of the same object, who has for ten years unceasingly denounced the abuses and the crimes of the Leopoldian régime, and who thinks that Belgium owes it to herself and to her international good name without delay to put an end to the system which is most deservedly provoking the reprobation of the civilized world. When I went for the first time to the Congo in the summer of 1908, the Belgian Parliament had just decided on annexation. The independent State had ceased to exist; the new régime had not begun; and, profiting by the interregnum, I was able to take account of the true situation better, perhaps, than I could have done at any other time. The agents were not afraid to speak; the official books were open to me; the natives I had a good interpretercame with every confidence to tell me their troubles and their complaints. On the river, however, at stations such as Irebu, Coquilhatville, or Lisala, these complaints were neither very numerous nor very acute; they referred generally to the heaviness of the taxes in food-fish or kwanga-and to the difficulty the taxpayers experienced in procuring coin. But it was quite another thing when we penetrated into the rubber forest, and for fifteen days traversed on foot the district of the Mongala, which has been made so notorious by the atrocities of the Société Anversoise. It is well known that, following on the discovery of these atrocities, the Congo The abuses and Lieutenant A., a State, in order to satisfy, or to appear to satisfy, public opinion, declared the Société Anversoise to be deprived of its powers of exploitation, and itself undertook the collection of rubber in the district, whilst agreeing to deliver it at four francs a kilogramme to the contracting Society, who sold it in the Antwerp market at eight or nine. This new régime, however, only slightly improved the situation. exactions continued. Belgian officer, who had been put at the head of the zone, made it produce sixty tons of rubber a month for two years; but the illegalities he committed in achieving this result caused the Protestant missionaries of Upoto to lodge a complaint against him in the courts. and in 1908 the tribunal of Mobeka pronounced judgment against him by default, which wound up with the following extraordinary tion: qualifica The prisoner, having committed, or caused to be committed, more than 60 assassinations, should be condemned to death, but as long residence amongst the natives must have deprived him of all sentiments of humanity (!) it would be fair to give him the benefit of extenuating circumstances and to inflict only twelve years' penal servitude. The American Consul, Mr. Smith, in his journey through this region of the Mongala in 1907, stated that the natives were obliged to remain fifteen or twenty days per month in the forest to be able to provide the quantities of rubber demanded of them. As a result of his report the taxes were reduced, first by one-half and then by two-thirds; instead of going into the forest every month the men liable to labor did not have to go oftener than once in two months, and then once in three. But in spite of these extenuations, which, indeed, were partly counteracted by the increasing rarity of the available vines, the repugnance of the blacks to the rubber work was only accentuated, and I can still hear the young chief, his head dressed with red parrot's feathers, saying to us, at the time of our journey to N'Gali, with the vigorous approval of his men: "Boula Matari (the State) may ask everything of us that it will, food, carriers, men to make roads, but we refuse to go again into the forest to make rubber." And that this aversion of the natives to go on journeys for rubber was a quite general phenomenon, both in the Abir and the Equatorial district and in the Mongala, was finally confirmed by the concurring testimonies of the officials whom I had occasion to meet. All, in fact, declared that, in consequence of the exhaustion of the forests, of the relaxation of pressure, and of the refusal of the natives to work for a contemptible wage, it was inevitable that the output of rubber must fail to an enormous extent. I was able also to verify to what degree these predictions were well founded when I returned to the Congo this year in order to plead in the case of the Kasai Company against the Rev. Messrs. Sheppard and Morrison at Leopoldville. From 1907 to 1908 the export of rubber from the Congo-including the French Congo-had already fallen in value from 43,982,748 francs to 30,779,500 francs, a decrease of nearly fifteen millions. In 1909 the fall has certainly been still greater, and when we were visiting the railway depôts at Matadi, through which all the products of the Upper Congo necessarily pass, our guide said to us: "There is still a good deal of rubber coming in from the French Congo, and also the production of the Kasai, which to-day represents 35 per cent. of the whole, shows no tendency to diminish; but the other districts yield less and less, and everything leads one to foresee that next year the deficit will simply be emphasized. In fact, the natives are not working any more, because on the one hand they are less terrorized, and on the other they are still not stimulated to work by sufficient remuneration." So that, even apart from all considerations of humanity and sentiment, the system of forced labor for rubber was doomed to disappear, for the same reason as slavery in other countries: because it did not pay any more; because from an economic point of view, it yielded decidedly inferior results to those which, after a longer or shorter period of transition, may be expected from free trade. This does not seem, however, to have been from the first the conviction of M. Jules Renkin, the first Belgian Minister for the Colonies. When he returned to Belgium, after three months spent on the Congo, visiting the river stations and the Kaisai, interrogating officials, native chiefs, missionaries, but without leaving his boat-without going into the interior, one might have believed that nothing had essentially been changed from the Leopoldian régime. His first interviews announced his intention of "continuing the work of the King," and in the speech which he made to the Cercle Africain d'Anvers a very unfortunate phrase: "The question of territories does not exist," succeeded in producing an impression nuch to be deplored, both in Belgium and abroad. But no doubt the reception given to this speech, the emphatic action which it produced in the movement of the Congo Reform Association, and especially the somewhat unexpected change which took place in the meantime in the disposition of Germany, led the Minister to alter his tactics. It is |