dealers with unpeeled masts, venders of bamboo for sail ribs, shipwrights, merchants of millet and rice and bean cake, had tacked their flimsy mud-andplaster shops one against the crazy walls of another. As we passed, their long pendulous signs, painted with the Chinese characters in black and gold, swung and creaked on their rusted brackets, for the wind was high. Those which were of cloth streamed straight out as pennons do, or, like red tongues doubling back upon themselves, bellied roundly, and then shook out with a report like the snapping of whips.

On the sea side an in-running tide slashed about the gray hulls of the junks, slapping their flanks and spouting up jeweled water between. Where the junks bumped and rubbed each other and jostled side to side, their gunwales groaned like old gentlemen with the gout. The masts stabbed the sky, or went sawing through it in great sweeping arcs. Below, the cordage and rigging swung nets to tangle the eye. High up, terns swept down the wind, or beat up into it in ascending spirals, or balanced with feathers frilled, poised satin-white against the stretched blue silk of the sky.

Out of ships came smells, for we passed close to the holds. Smells of fish; of tar; of resin from new pine masts sweating their sap; of mildewed sailcloth; of musty kaoliang; of bitter bricks of tea; of camphor wood from the far south; of sweet, pungent joss; of wine from a broken keg; of flour turned mouldy by brine; and over all the knifelike thrust of the smell of bean cake. As we plodded along through ankle-deep dust which grimed our white shoes to a dinginess darker than slate, we passed a score of newly landed junks unloading this bean cake from their holds. The quai side rang with the singsong of their stevedores. They swayed by, sweating, in pairs, a

bamboo pole borne on the shoulders between them, and slung from the pole one bean cake as large as an artillery wheel. Under its weight each pair of coolies bowed their backs and sagged at the knees, for the cake had been heavily wetted during its passage. As a result the air around us choked with a rancidness which stuck like a bone in the throat.

It was with much relief that we at last turned in at the door of a junk hong. The interpreter having asked for the head man, a servant went out to get him; another servant, lifting the curtain of split bamboo which hung over the doorway, let us into an inner room. Passing from here into another room, we penetrated deeper into the dimness of the interior. The last room, after the August sun of outdoors, seemed as dim and dank as a cave. Here, I told myself, one hired junks for trading in strange ports. From this dim room went out clumsy argosies to try their fortunes on the sea.

I saw a dirt floor and about it square Chinese chairs with carved arms and straight carved backs. The kang platform, occupying a third of the room, was spread with grass mats; a low black opium table with carved legs crouched in its centre. I knew that in the long Manchurian winter the crowd of sleepers lay huddled together here on the kang while in the oven beneath them stalks of burning kaoliang gave out heat through the intervening bricks. At the end of the room stood a small, high table, and on it, pushed back against the wall, an incense pot, a tall ancestor tablet like a miniature gravestone, strange-lipped candlesticks of long-unpolished pewter, two unburnt tapers, square, candy-red, and with a wick of gold, and a gilt-encrusted foreign clock with its dial roguishly painted in pink and blue hearts, flowers, and cupids.

altered, even if raised, and the Jew will certainly alter the standard of life in Palestine. For the immigrants are progressive, intellectual people, making demands upon life for body and spirit that Arabs have never dreamed of.

I have heard the Arab leaders make various other complaints, largely including the British administration under our Mandate from the League of Nations. But one may ask them to remember that, though corruption is still common in some of the lower law courts, as in all the East, the judges of the higher courts are for the first time above suspicion; that excellent roads now run all over the country; that within the last twelve years motors have increased from one to a thousand; that the British have introduced a water supply and some idea of cleanliness even into Jerusalem; that the Jewish society of Hadassah, maintained by American Jewesses, teaches the laws of health and child welfare to Arab mothers as well as to Jew and Christian; that the Jewish pioneers are destroying the hideous curse of malaria in what ought to be the most fertile parts of the country; and, finally, that the British administration has delivered Arabs from the equally terrible curse of the Turkish conscription that held every man bound for four years, and often for ten. The Arabs have not really much complaint to make against Jew or Briton, but one can understand their apprehensions.

It is more difficult for me to understand the hostility of many English people in Palestine toward Zionism. That hostility takes two forms: official and religious. Many high officials, perhaps most, acquiesce in the Balfour Declaration, and do their utmost to carry it out, seeing that it represents the will of the British Government. But there are others who object to 'the intrusion' of Jews into what they

are inclined to regard as a British and Arab reserve. An Englishman like myself may perhaps sympathize with their feeling; for we are all brought up to dislike and despise Jews as a race, and we are particularly good at governing 'natives,' so long as they remain quiet and submissive, as the Palestinian Arabs usually do. We enjoy a subject people whom we can treat as good dogs, feed well, order about, and pat kindly on the head when they are quiet and obey without hesitation. We cannot treat the immigrant highly educated Jews from Germany, Poland, or Russia so, and therefore the officials complain of them as 'aggressive,' assertive, and troublesome. It is a natural complaint, but the cause is really laudable.

Far more difficult to explain or remove is the hostility of the religious English residents - especially, of course, the Anglican clergy. One would have expected them to love and befriend the race which, after all, has given them their main idea of the God they worship, and from among whom sprang the sacred Person whom they regard as actually Divine. The facts are far otherwise. It was among the members of the Anglican Church that I found the most marked hostility to all Jews, but especially to Zionists, who are endeavoring to return to a land which the history of the Jews has consecrated in the estimation of all Anglicans and other Christians. The hostility is rancorous and envenomed. Though I have known many Anglicans, it rather astonished me. But theological hatred swelters in hearts beyond the reach of reason. I need hardly add that the Roman Catholics are opposed alike to Zionists and to the 'Protestant' British administration.

There are now about a hundred Zionist settlements in Palestine, and within the last few months I have

which was not small. Fairly large? Ah, hao, hao, hao. The price? H'mthe price- no need to worry about the price. That would be reasonable. (The ribs of the fan snapped shut against each other as one claps together a row of books stacked loose between book-ends.) The price would be twenty-five dollars a day.

'Tell him,' Douglas said, 'nothing doing on this by-the-day business. We'll never get back for Thanksgiving if we pay money by the day. How much for the trip?' The interpreter translated. The manager smiled from the kang.

By the trip? Oh, pu, pu, pu, pu, pu! Impossible! Puhsin! Impossible. How can one know the winds, the strength of the tides? We might be blown all the way in six days, but we might have evil winds and our trip differ not much from twenty to thirty days. By the trip? Quite impossible.

"Tell him,' said Douglas, 'to pipe down on these horrors of the sea and to give us a price for the trip, and to be quick about it.'

"The foreign gentlemen,' translated the interpreter, 'much appreciate your forewarning them of all the perils of the heavens and the sea, but they believe that Heaven will favor them with a fair breeze. Perhaps you, sir, would consider telling them what a fair price would be for the trip if by any chance you should waive your prejudices.'

The fan tapped the grass mat of the kang.

'For the trip. Hao-hao-h'mh'm'm. I will speak in one last word - three hundred and fifty dollars.'

"Tell him he's got us all wrong,' Douglas instructed. 'We want to hire his junk - not buy it.'

"The foreign gentleman wishes to suggest that possibly you, sir, have overestimated the expenses and asked

a price too high,' said the interpreter, following Douglas's instructions.

Ah, pu shih, pu shih- there is no mistake. He would not think of overestimating for foreigners. He had given them a special consideration! May his grandmother be ashamed of him if he has not spoken fairly. But the other way so much for each day is cheaper, then? That is very good. Perhaps, with good wind — only four days- quite possible. For emphasis he spit on the floor. It was not an ineffectual emphasis, but the act of a professional.

'No!' from Douglas. "Tell him nothing doing, absolutely. Tell him our clothes would wear out before we got back. Tell him to come down out of the crosstrees and stow that by-theday business. Trip or nothing!'

"The foreign gentleman says that he knows your junks are very fine, in fact the best on the water front, and that, as you say, they might make the journey even in four days; but he must hire a boat by the trip, for that is his custom,' the interpreter translated with as close an accuracy as the two races are usually capable of.

While the hong manager ran over several score of reasons why a junk could not be hired except by the day, I once more glanced at my watch. Another hour had almost passed.

The servants circulated again with fresh tea from galvanized iron watering pots, and a new can of cigarettes. I noted that the crowd looking on had been increased to seventeen. They stood to one side, void of expression, wooden as mannequins.

"Tell him,' I heard Douglas urging, 'that we will give him seventy dollars for the trip. It took twelve days last year. If we get in under twelve days, they still keep the whole seventy dollars. For any time over we'll give seven dollars a day up to the fifteenth

a common front to the enemy. But the long-drawn-out negotiations with Mr. Lloyd George which followed, in which Mr. de Valera showed no inclination to come to grips with realities, proved that all was not well behind the scenes. Mr. de Valera himself, who, in spite of his meteoric rise to fame, was in the unhappy position of being a third-class man in a first-class place, was to some extent a bridge between the two factions, but when the terms of the Treaty were finally disclosed he was pulled down on the extreme side of the hedge, with the result that he gave an air of national importance to an irreconcilable and impossible minority which he could neither lead nor control. There followed the wearisome debates on the Treaty in the Dail or Irish House of Representatives, aptly christened 'the Great Talk,' the acceptance of the Treaty by a few votes, interminable attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, and a general election in which the common people of the country, aided by proportional representation, burst the bonds of a dishonest political pact made by the rival factions and declared decisively for the Treaty, whereupon there came the chaos of civil war.

It is difficult for those unacquainted with Irish politics to comprehend the reasons for these strange and tragic happenings. The real truth, always disguised and never honestly admitted, was that the great majority of the Irish people did not particularly want a republic, although they did want freedom. They had seen the constitutional movement sink in the Serbonian bog of the Westminster Parliament. They had watched John Redmond, too great a gentleman and too honest a man to be a match for English politicians, fail before intrigue and treachery. Nothing was left but force. England had always responded to force

when words had failed. But one could not morally use force in support of a constitutional demand such as was embodied in the Home Rule Act of 1914. So in 1916, when the Home Rule Act had been suspended and the new movement flared into active rebellion, it was as a republic, demanding and asserting its right to complete independence. How many of its leaders really believed such an aim attainable it is difficult to say. To most of them the word 'republic' was synonymous with such complete freedom as is enjoyed by France or the United States of America, rather than with any special form of political government. In so far as their demands were dishonest they ended in political disaster and recrimination. Those of them who were sincere had forgotten, if they ever knew, that England's objection to an Irish Republic is not to the thing but to the name. The real rulers of England will not suffer such a challenge to their entire social system to exist at their very door.

Mr. H. G. Wells in his latest novel has put the matter in words I cannot better. "The King,' he writes, 'is necessarily the head and centre of the old army system, of the diplomatic tradition, of hieratic privileges, of a sort of false England that veils the realities of English life. While he remains, the old army system remains, society remains, the militant tradition remains, they are all bound up together inseparably.' It was against this rock that whatever was real and honest in the Irish Republican movement broke in vain. The attitude of the great majority of the Irish people was one of expectancy and watchfulness. In 1918 they had given a clear electoral mandate against the old Irish Party and in favor of the policy of abstention from the English parliament. "The people,' said Father O'Flanagan, one

of the Sinn Fein leaders, in a candid after-victory speech, 'have voted Sinn Fein. What we have to do now is to explain to them what Sinn Fein is.' The victory was indeed one of emotion rather than of conviction. The subsequent election of 1920 was not contested at all, because by that time the gun had taken the place of the ballot box. The people remained quite unconvinced that the policy of proclaiming a phantom republic was a certain panacea for our political ills, but they had perforce to give the experiment its chance. When the Treaty was concluded they soon discovered, however, that a Free State in the hand was worth any number of republics in the bush, and decisively said so. There followed the civil war.

Mr. P. S. O'Hegarty, at one time member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and now Secretary of the Free State Post Office, has pointed the moral of that tragic dénouement in his recent remarkable book. 'I know of no clearer example,' he writes, of the application of the Moral Law than this tragedy of the Irregular devastation of Ireland. We devised certain "bloody instructions" to use against the British. We adopted political assassination as a principle; we devised the ambush; we encouraged women to forget their sex and play at gunmen; we turned the whole thoughts and passions of a generation upon blood, revenge, and death; we placed gunmen, mostly half educated, and totally inexperienced, as dictators with powers of life and death over large areas. We derided the Moral Law and said there was no law but the law of force. And the Moral Law answered us. Every devilish thing we did against the British went its full circle and smote us tenfold, and the cumulative effect of the whole of it was a general moral weakening and a general

degradation, and a general cynicism and disbelief in either virtue or de cency, in goodness or uprightness or honesty.' I need add nothing to this powerful and courageous indictment.

II

After enormous damage, both moral and material, the civil war ended in unconditional surrender in April 1923. The country began slowly to recover its normal life, and the Government, which had been living in a cage behind armed guards, began to take the air once more. If they and their predecessors, Griffith and Collins, were to a great extent responsible, by their weak parleys with de Valera and the extremists after the Treaty, for much of the disaster which fell upon us, they had the courage to face the conse quences of their own actions. That the infant State survived is due to their courage and determination in the face of enormous odds and tremendous difficulties. In the five years which have passed since they took office they have fought a bitter civil war to a successful conclusion, created law and order out of chaos, embarked on farreaching social and economic schemes, balanced the national budget, and initiated the completion of land purchase, that legislative and financial process by which the tenant farmers of Ireland have been enabled with state assistance to acquire the absolute ownership of the land, thus putting an end to the landlord régime. These achievements are all the more remarkable when one remembers that they are the work of young and inexperienced men who started their executive career without a considered policy in front of them or a properly organized party behind them. Much of their work has naturally been improvised and hasty. When they took