Congress that our purpose was to add further new vessels to our navy only to take the place of old ones passing out of service. In his message to Congress in December, he says, "It was hoped the Hague Conference might deal with the question of the limitation of armaments," expresses his disappointment at the failure of concerted action, and adds, "Such being the fact, it would be most unwise for us to stop the upbuilding of our navy. To build one battleship of the best and most advanced type a year would barely keep our fleet up to its present force. This is not enough. In my judgment, we should this year provide for four battleships."

This means $40,000,000, with $20,000,000 more for extras.

Nothing can justify such a demand as this, and it is to be hoped Congress will deal with it with common sense. The one plausible pretext for it-nothing in the Japanese budget excuses it

is the action of England and Germany. England two years ago expressed her willingness to hold her programme for naval increase in abeyance, pending some possible action by the Hague Conference looking to the proportionate limitation of armaments. The Hague Conference took no action; and we are now witnessing the immense new activity of the British navy-yards, the pushing especially of large battleships of the Dreadnought class; within two years, we are told, Great Britain will have a fleet numbering a round dozen of these monsters.

Germany will by 1917 have seventeen Dreadnoughts. The new scheme will require $17,500,000 a year more than the German navy previously has cost. The borrowings of the empire since the inauguration of the programme of 1900 have already reached the total of $360, 000,000.

It is not surprising that Herr Bebel, in the discussion following the reading of the budget in the Reichstag, should declare it to be evident that a war is being planned by Germany upon Great Britain. It is not surprising that many here, and more in Europe, should believe, when our fleet was ordered to the Pacific, that it was meant for war with Japan. Most sane men refused to believe it, as they refuse to believe that Germany is planning war upon England; but in both cases great folly has been exhibited at a critical time, when there was peculiar need of soberness and restraint. The socialist leader declared that the German Navy League was agitating the war on Great Britain, and that this agitation could be observed on all sides. Nobody who knows Germany well will question this. The Navy League in Germany is composed of much the same elements as the similar

body so pregnant with similar mischief in this country, and the organizations which are working to make England “a nation in arms." There are almost as many people in Germany as in England and America who still chatter about "trade following the flag;" and a poor contingent of the junkers in the Prussian Herrenhaus, with sundry uneasy military folk, would like to see the flag make almost any audacious venture, to the tune of "Deutschland über Alles," quite regardless of trade considerations. The Navy League's activities during the Emperor's absence in England were worse than ever before, so extravagant indeed that many of its most eminent and respectable members resigned from the organization. In the very week of the Emperor's return, the Berlin Tageblatt, the leading Berlin newspaper, advised all the

moderate members to leave it. The League, it said, “has gradually become pernicious; it has been the source of the constant agitation which threatens to put Germany at enmity with the whole world and especially with England." The League condemns the extravagant new naval programme as too small, as a violent faction in London similarly condemns the British Admiralty; and no one can say to what lengths these hotheads may temporarily push large sections of their peoples.

But are these wild naval folk the German nation? Do they control the sober German thought or ultimate German policy? Have they countenance from the best German statesmanship, or from the German Emperor? As concerns England, the capital misfortune has been that the popular and perhaps dominant idea has long prevailed that they do exactly represent the Emperor. "The favorite English conception of the Kaiser," said the leading liberal London journal, with but slight exaggeration, while the Kaiser was in England, "is that of a War Lord, with a stern face and fierce moustache, making bellicose speeches, in a uniform decorated with the death's head and crossbones. The fact that he has never made war does not impress them." In truth, with all his glorifications of monarchy and the army, the Kaiser's speech at the Guildhall, like his similarly pacific word at Amsterdam on his way back to Berlin, was in strict accord with the whole tenor of his utterances concerning any such matter as that in which troubled Englishmen have held him under suspicion. What he said at the Guildhall he meant. He meant it when he said at Bremen two years ago, when unveiling a statue of the late Emperor Frederick, "When I came to the throne after my grandfather's Titanic age, I swore a soldier's oath that I would do my utmost to keep at rest the bayonet and the cannon." He meant it when he said at Düsseldorf as far back as 1891, “I only wish that the peace of Europe lay

in my hand; I should certainly take care that it never again is broken." In one word, with all reservations for things in the German and especially the Prussian system which the democrat hates, — and the present crisis exhibiting anew the scandalous injustice in the suffrage makes his hate now very hot, the German Emperor, as Andrew D. White and President Butler of Columbia and Professor Peabody of Harvard have been forcibly reminding us, is the ablest and most enlightened ruler in Christendom. If his recent visit to England serves in any degree, as happily it seems to be doing, to make Englishmen trust more securely that such a one does not easily lend himself to plots such as many have feared and suspected, something will have been accomplished towards bringing the two nations themselves into better accord.

It is for this end that the serious journals of the two nations are doing such praiseworthy and necessary work. The American press can do much for the world's peace and order, much for England and Germany, by registering with power the judgment that, as another has said, "there is a place for both nations in the sunshine," and it is time for them to cease "making faces at each other." I, for one, am no more a believer in any Pan-Teutondom than I am in an exclusive and arrogant Anglo-Saxondom; but it has come about that at this juncture the success of the policies which must chiefly determine international justice and progress depends preeminently upon the fraternity and hearty coöperation of England, Germany, and the United States. The Kaiser's Guildhall utterance upon what constitutes "the main prop and base for the peace of the world" should be expanded to just that form. Germany's own recognition of the preeminent importance to her people of their increasing practical relations to the English-speaking world appears in the recent substitution of English for French as the required modern language in her high schools.

There is not much danger that we in the United States shall ever again do long or serious injustice to England: the ties that bind us are too many. But, were it only for the reason that most of us read English newspapers ten times as much as we read German ones, there is danger that we may not do justice to Germany and may become victims of the malign talk about her being the chief disturber of the peace, and logically provoking "isolation," and the other direful things. Germany becomes day by day our own more and more formidable commercial rival, as she is England's; and it is always easy to do injustice to our rivals. It may sometime be as necessary for the United States as for England to consider that, if Germany crowds sharply in some of the markets, it is usually by means which are not proper occasions for resentment and pique, but for praise and imitation -by recognition of the fact discerned by the shrewd youth in the anatomy class, that "the brain is a very useful organ: it is useful to think with." She has brought thorough education to bear on industry and trade, where many of the rest of us have stumbled on by rule of thumb; and in the very fields where the Englishman and the American have perhaps the greater fertility and originality, she has often distanced them by method and training. It is pleasant and most useful to see men like President Pritchett and Professor Hanus applauding her at this time for this superiority, and commending her methods to the American people.

It is not in industrial education alone, however, or chiefly, that we may learn from Germany, or that we are under obligation for high service rendered. From the time when Horace Mann published his report on the schools of Germany, in 1843, the German influence has been the strongest foreign influence upon our public school system; and for a far longer period, from the time, ninety years ago, when Everett and Ticknor and Cogswell and Bancroft went to study

at Göttingen, to the present time, the German universities have been in a high degree our graduate schools. It fortifies one's soul to know, when we hear of "strained relations," real or possible, between America and Germany, or England and Germany, that among the things "made in Germany" which have most general currency in the Republic is the so great proportion of our best scholarship; that our American colleges and universities are filled with men in every field of thought and learning who, thronging to the German universities in these last decades, have come home to weave all over this broad land a web of such love and admiration and gratitude as, with that other web woven by the millions of our people who are bound to Germany by the close ties of race, shall surely suffice, in any time of folly or stress, to smite down the Philistines and maintain justice here toward the great land of Luther and Goethe and Kant.

The scholars whom Harvard and Yale and Columbia year by year are sending to Berlin, in that happy interchange of professors which was itself suggested by the German Emperor, will each and all be ambassadors of this fraternity. If Professor Kühnemann, who came from Germany a year ago to lecture at Harvard, and has been writing of his experience and impressions so warmly in the German periodicals since his return, is a fair representative, the Germans of the interchange will be similar ambassadors: and we shall not only learn lessons from Germany which we need, but Germany will be plainly told of many things American which she needs. Professor Kühnemann, going home from America, has plainly told her that the excessive assertion of the principle of authority and the absurd dictatorship so prevalent in Germany need to give place to larger freedom and individual initiative in education and in life.

In the summer of 1909, the University of Leipzig will celebrate the fifth centennial of its founding, and the Uni

versity of Berlin its first centennial. Hundreds of American scholars will join with others in pious pilgrimage to the old halls to which they owe so much. It were to be wished that the commemoration might be marked by a GermanAmerican educational exposition at Leipzig, in which the two nations should submit to each other and the world representations of their best achievements in every field of education. In some hall

of the exposition, day by day, the best educators of America and Germany and the world should exchange their wisdom. The best American message would have

no more to do with the large freedom and individual initiative which Professor Kühnemann is commending in our education than with the inspiring new movement which is so rapidly enlisting our universities and our public-school system itself in the cause of peace and the better organization of the world. Old England's scholars, like our own, will share in the great German commemorations in 1909; and the thinkers of England, Germany, and America should there unite in epoch-making speech and action in behalf of international justice and fraternity.

It is now nearly fifty years since Robert Browning rescued from "odds and ends of ravage" that strewed San Lorenzo square his unique source for The Ring and the Book, the "old yellow book.' With eyes riveted to its pages, he made his way homeward that June day. By the time he reached Casa Guidi, his mere casual curiosity as a bibliophile had been quickened by hints of a more human interest. All the afternoon he read on and on in those time-stained pages, until as evening fell the book was finished and laid by. That night, as he trod the terrace, the story of forgotten crime acted itself over again to his mind's eye, and the actors long since returned to dust were again suffering and sinning creatures. The human tragedy had reawakened from the gloomy, dull record. But it was only after the lapse of four years that the poet wrought from it his most protracted and comprehensive poem.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington, which has done much for science in its brief existence, now offers as its first publication on a literary subject this

"old yellow book." The poet's original copy which he bequeathed to Balliol College, Oxford, has been reproduced in complete photo-facsimile.1

This waif of a forgotten crime was not a published volume, but a collection of the testimony and arguments in the Franceschini murder case, tried in the criminal courts of Rome during January and February of 1698. The papal press had printed these matters in a series of pamphlets for use in the court. The pamphlets were then gathered along with certain other kindred material into a vellum cover, their collector probably being a Florentine lawyer of the day who had a technical interest in the case. This record is full of sophistries, of the shrewd thrust and parry of a great legal battle, of the torturing of fact and motive, of charge and countercharge, all weighed down by masses of precedent which further per

ing's The Ring and the Book, reproduced in photo-facsimile; translated and edited by CHARLES W. HODELL. Washington, D. C.: The Carnegie Institution. 1907.

1 The Old Yellow Book. Source of Brown

plex the lay reader. It is one of the least literary, one of the most chaotic and forbidding of source books at first sight.

Yet the general fact of this tragic story which found its end in Guido's execution is plain enough in the book. Franceschini, of a poor but noble house of Arezzo, had after years of vain service to a cardinal in Rome sought to mend his fortunes by marriage. His rank more than made amends for his age and mean appearance when he made advances to the Comparini, a family of the comfortable middle class, for the hand of their thirteenyear-old daughter. But there was cheating on both sides of the bargain. And so the marriage was scarcely made when domestic bitterness arose. The Comparini declared that Pompilia was a mere foundling of infamous birth, and accordingly had no rights in their property. The husband's disappointed greed soon turned to deadly hatred against the childwife left in his power. After three years, she fled back to her foster parents in Rome, using the aid of a young priest, Canon Caponsacchi. The fugitives were overtaken and arrested. After trial for adultery at the husband's accusation, Caponsacchi was given a light sentence, and Pompilia was placed for safe-keeping in a monastery, from which she was subsequently removed to her parents' home. Here a few months later her husband sought her out and slew her along with her foster parents. It is the record of his trial for this murder which fills the pages of the old yellow book.

Such is the harsh story which fell into the poet's hands. Sordidness, subterfuge, viciousness, brutality darken the record. These are intensified by the web of sophistries woven around them by the lawyers. Crime, not tragedy, is apparent. The art impulse seems utterly absent from the report. And yet by that strange affinity whereby the artist is drawn to his own proper material, Browning felt the call of the book. On its flyleaf he inscribed a motto from Pindar: "Her strongest winged dart my Muse hath yet

in store." In this conviction he devoted four of his ripest years to the transmutation of the crude old volume into his great poem.

The human interest which drew Browning to this old volume was probably due in large part to the few white pages that save the story. One piece of convincing testimony presents the child-wife as no mere negative victim, but as a suffering saint. This is the testimony of Fra Celestino, the Augustinian monk, who had been her spiritual guide during her dying hours. Only four days after her decease he made the following affidavit, which is further supported by the affidavits of ten other eye-witnesses:

I, the undersigned, bare-footed Augustinian priest, pledge my faith, that inasmuch as I was present, helping Signora Francesca Pompilia from the first instant of her pitiable case, even to the very end of her life, I say and attest on my priestly oath, in the presence of the God who must judge me, that to my own confusion I have discovered and marvelled at an innocent and saintly conscience in that everblessed child. During the four days she survived, when exhorted by me to pardon her husband, she replied with tears in her eyes and with a placid and compassionate voice, "May Jesus pardon him, as I have already done with all my heart." But what is more to be wondered at is that although she suffered great pain, I never heard her speak an offensive or impatient word, nor show the slightest outward vexation either toward God or those near by. But ever submissive to the Divine Will, she said: "May God have pity on me," in such a way indeed, as would have been incompatible with a soul that was not at one with God. To such an union one does not attain in a moment, but rather by the habit of years. I say further that I have always seen her selfrestrained, and especially during medical treatment. On these occasions, if her habit of life had not been good, she would not have minded certain details around