in requital of our ancient "forbearance" we are met with the inhuman arguments of lawyers, with the pedantry of a "college-professor." How then shall the friendship between the two nations be, as Lincoln hoped it would be, "perpetual"? Let Mr. Wilson ponder the words of the greatest President who Blackwood's Magazine.

ever sojourned at the White House, and ask himself what Lincoln would have done and said in the crisis of today, and whether he, the last upon whom the mantle of Lincoln has descended, is worthily upholding the traditions of a great office.

"Poor and abundant, downtrodden, almighty Mother Russia," writes Nekrasov in his Who is Happy in Russia? It might be an epigram on the work of Dostoievski and the irrepressible influence of Russian mentality upon the world of today. Perhaps it was this tidal fact that really made Germany so jealous and nervous as to the future of Teutonic Kultur. The floodgates of the Russian temperament are being opened, and the remonstrances of a few intellectuals such as Shaw, Murray, Dickinson and Brandès are less than futile. We welcome the oncoming flood. As Christians the Russians shame us, and make us feel in comparison the joints where our armor is most vulnerable-hypocrisy and love of money. Like most autocratically governed States, they are real democrats, almost as much so as the Chinese. Their humility and lack of pride vis-a-vis of suffering and sin have further lessons for us, more human and, perhaps, most valuable of all.

Yasnaya Polyana has been compared to Ferney-Voltaire. The challenge of Dostoievski, if less immediately dominant, has in it, perhaps, more of the subtle pervasiveness of Jean-Jacques. These Russians, it may prove, are to be the Voltaire and Rousseau of the nineteenth century. How little we suspected it when we first read their books! It is surprising.

*Dostoievski: His Life and Literary Activity." A Biographical Sketch, by Eugenii Soloviev. Translated from the Russian by C. J. Hogarth Allen & Unwin. 5s net.

Twenty years ago our English knowledge of Dostoievski was practically limited to Poor Folk, Crime and Punishment, and Buried Alive in Siberia. Upon such knowledge and what could be derived from a grateful and admiring study of De Vogüé's book on The Russian Novel-there were few enough books upon Russian Literary Landmarks then I was summarily called upon to write an article on the Russian Master to fit in between Dost Mahommed and Douay for an Encyclopædia. I re-read the result yesterday and was surprised, not unagreeably. The fact is that De Vogüé's is a very good book indeed and that much knowledge tends to confuse judgment. Now by Baring, Graham, Sarolea and a dozen others Dostoievski is beatified, canonized, sainted. His complete novels are accessible in French and almost, if not quite, in English, transfused into our tongue by Constance Garnett. It would hardly do now to describe Dostoievski as "Gaboriau with psychological sauce." You must talk about him and Holy Russia and the religion of suffering very respectfully indeed. He has become the Slav Dickens, and has a clan of champions and biographers. The name of his latest biographer is already famous. It is not in the Encyclopædia yet, but will certainly be in the next edition. It is too Russian a biography to please us altogether -too Slavonic, too nebulous, too sketchy. You cannot get a good bite at it.

Nevertheless, it is interesting, characteristic.

I think it will be conceded that the time has come when a long if superficial acquaintance with the novelist should entitle me to call him Thedor Mikhailovitch, though I do so with misgiving, since I perceive that some august critics style him Feodor. His life really is a bewildering thing, and accords badly with the accurate selfpropulsion into plenty and good society which has marked the careers of our successful home novelists. The untidiness, so characteristic of Russian life, seems to slop over into the lives and minds of their writers. Contrast the financial ability and pervasive orderliness of a career such as that of Charles Dickens with the devastating chaos, despondency, despair and pecuniary confusion of a Gogol or a Dostoievski.

The last, for a life, led one continual succession of tremors and troubles, with hardly a serene interval anywhere. In the first place, a troubled youth with haunting thoughts of suicide, poverty, self-distrust, suspicion. of friends, parents, self: a youth destitute of love and faith, filled with despair and melancholy, haunted with a constant yet ever-elusive vision of fame, clenched in the grim vice of material servitude and dependence. A man with such an ardent imagination would be sure to picture to himself a future of poverty and homelessness. His two marriages-one to the widow of a fellow-convict, with a family, whom he loved in a distracted kind of way, in spite of renewed proof of incompatibility; and, secondly, an amanuensis, who had a temporary liaison with another even during their courtship ("our joint life was not a happy one") -these meagre unions seem to show how niggardly a hand he expected his destiny to show. He was almost to the last a borrower of small sums, a fugitive from creditors, a Micawber of impe

cuniosity and improvidence, though with something of the singular and eccentric precaution which prompted that great man to store the heads and tails of shrimps in his waistcoat pockets. "An unhealthy misanthropy poisoned his every pleasure and made him repellent to all, and his weakness of volition laid him so entirely open to passing whims that he became the slave of his own fancies, while fully understanding the horror of such servitude.” And to his youth, for an offense almost exactly similar to that of Silvio Pellico, succeeded the death sentence and the term of imprisonment as a political in Siberia-six long grievous years of waiting and a ceaseless struggle with an insatiable, irrepressible hunger for life. And when at length came the glorious moment of release it proved a moment spoiled by material difficulties, even as the novelist's later rapture of literary creation were spoiled through the fact of his genius having to slave for money and to wring and torture itself over long-drawn novels (which he describes himself as crouching over and tormenting) in the tremendous effort to make ends meet, to support his wife and family, to avert the wrath of the censorship, and to win his way back to residence in Russia.

Yet he had some great momentsthe discovery of his talent in 1846, when Bielinski (the cosmopolitan critic), Nekrasov and the rest sat up all night reading Poor Folk, ejaculating "Terrible, terrible!" "What a man!" "Oh! what a great writer!" and the spell he cast over young Russia by his speech at the Pushkin festival-was it in 1876 (dates are strangely to seek in this book)?-when a young man auditor is said to have swooned at his feet and the whole audience was carried off its feet by this peasant of genius. From then to his death in the early days of 1881, while the famous snowstorm was raging in this country, he was indeed

famous. Short, lean, neurotic, worn and bowed down by sixty years of misfortune, faded rather than aged, with a look of an invalid of uncertain age, with a long beard and hair still bushy, breathing something of the cat-life of the literary proletarian. "Work from want and for money has crushed and devoured me!" The face, says his best interpreter, De Vogüé was "that of a Russian peasant, a real Moscow mujik with flat nose, small sharp eyes deeply set, sometimes dark and gloomy, sometimes gentle and mild. The forehead was large and bumpy, the temples very hollow as if hammered in. His drawn, twitching features seemed to press down on his sad-looking mouth. The New Witness.

I have never before seen such a sad expression on any face." It is fitting somehow that his masterpiece, the Brothers Karamazof, should still be a chef-d'œuvre inconnu, for few can read it. It is clear that, as with Scott, Hugo, Dickens, Tolstoi, his work cannot be judged like the exquisite pieces of Turgenev and Gontcharov, by artistic standards exclusively. There is something of Michael Angelo about his work, something of the major Hebraic prophet. He lived and suffered for an apotheosis. His legend will be that of the prophet of Russian Nationalism -the Russianization of that great barrier empire and people whose soul is even now in the crucible.

Thomas Seccombe.

It will not be many weeks before the lifting of the veil which has so long hidden coming events in German East Africa from our expectant eyes, and we may then hope to see the comforting spectacle of the lowering of the black-and-yellow standard, with the blasphemous reference to 1870, in the Kaiser's last stronghold on African soil. It is not going to be a very easy "show," but the end is worth waiting for, and we shall wait with perfect confidence. Only last mail brought a letter from a high official at Nairobi, in which he said, "I wish I could say more on the subject, but look out for news in about six weeks' time"; and the context, which I do not feel at liberty to quote (and which the Editor would not publish if I did), indicated a justification for the most optimistic view of the situation.

German East Africa, the spoiled child of the Reichskolonialamt, is nearly as large as both our East African Protectorates together, and is very much richer, particularly in minerals,

including gold, iron, and coal. The population, Masai and Bantu, is also estimated at close on ten millionsa figure which, if correct, exceeds that of British East Africa and Uganda together, which aggregate no more than eight millions at the outside. Yet we need not attach undue importance to this preponderance of native subjects, since, in the first place, they are not all equally well affected towards their German masters; and in the second, the campaign will be won and lost by white men, as the enemy will realize with the first considerable invasion from the Rhodesian frontier.

The political position of German East Africa could not well be worse when the situation begins to develop. It has not a mile of friendly or even neutral territory on its borders. Hemmed in by British, Belgian, and Portuguese territory, its chief port menaced by Zanzibar, and its settlements on Lake Victoria at the mercy of our armed steamers, its outlook is not a happy one. Utterly cut off from the outer world,

it must defend itself with its present resources, and these, though doubtless provided during many years of intelligent anticipation at Dar es Salem, cannot be inexhaustible. True, it has a more elaborate network of railways than we have established in the neighboring Protectorate, but the irony of the situation is that a considerable proportion of its thousand miles of iron road has a commercial rather than a strategic value; and only the main system, from the ocean to Lake Tanganyika, will eventually be of service in those rapid lateral concentrations by which the outnumbered garrisons will alone be able to prolong the inevitable decision in our favor.

It is not to be denied that, as preliminary raids have already demonstrated, our own Uganda Railway is more vulnerable at some points than could have been wished. Yet even where it runs closest to German territory-say, between Tsavo and the Kilimanjaro district, it is FO well guarded that the enemy can only organize trifling affairs at night, doing no more damage than can be repaired by the available emergency gangs in time for next day's train.

It may, therefore, without further preamble, be assumed that, long before the issue of the war is dec ded nearer home, German East Africa will have changed masters; and there remains the interesting problem of what is to be done with it. Give it back to the Wilhelmstrasse on the signing of peace? Such a solution of the difficulty may be relegated to the furtive proceedings of peace meetings, which are forever dinning into our ears that a great imperial nation must have its place in the sun, and that we have no right, even when victorious, to bottle Germany up inside her own frontiers. The reply to which is quite obviously that we asked nothing better than to live at peace with our unpleasant

neighbors south of Vanga and Shirat, and that they alone are to blame for the unavoidable revision of the old arrangement. It was by the grace of Queen Victoria that the beautiful land of the Unyamwesi became German; it will shortly be by the grace of King George that it will become British. What England gave, she can take away.

Yet this does not settle the future of the country. It is inconceivable that this magnificent unit of African Empire, which is twice the size of British East Africa, should henceforth rank as a mere appanage of that Protectorate. There is very little in common between the two regions, since, though sisal and cocoanut are of first importance in the coast belt of both, our present territory must be regarded as mainly pastoral, whereas, as has already been pointed out, the mining interest, absent (and, as some think, fortunately) from British East Africa, must inevitably assume a prominent place in the future development of the new colony. This alone links it rather with Rhodesia; and as it is an open secret that the determining factor in German evacuation is to come from that quarter, we foresee a closer association with a Greater Central Africa. The Government at Nairobi, which, just before the outbreak of the war, took over the administration of Zanzibar, has its hands full without the new and vast responsibilities entailed in the control of yet another ten million natives, and the Colonial Office will in all probability arrive at a smoother solution of the difficulty by bringing Dar es Salem in closer touch with Blantyre and Salisbury. Apart from the many other advantages of this settlement, this would give both Nyasaland and Rhodesia a British port on the ocean; an outlet which, friendly as our relations will always be with Portugal, cannot but be preferable to their present dependence on Beira and

Chinde. To those who prefer to pull a long face over current events much of the foregoing will no doubt savor of counting our chickens before they are hatched. I can only repeat that friends on the spot who are able to see The Outlook.

something of the hatching in process are absolutely confident that to borrow a homely phrase from sporting circles-all is over in German East Africa bar the shouting.

F. G. A.

"If uplift's the word," said a New York paper some time ago in a headline, with a fine and vague threat in the uncompleted sentence. "Uplift" certainly is the word in the United States, as you discover before you have enjoyed many hours in the country. When you have been there a week you begin to reflect upon its significance as a social symptom. In England you have not come across the term-that is, you have not known it as an abstract noun of ethical import. The young men of Carmelite House have not yet learned to use it. The popular dictionaries do not contain it. Even the big Webster, that sound American classic, has no place for it; but we must assume that Sir James Murray's successors, when shortly they come up with the U's in the greatest of all dictionaries, will not be able to pass it by. Now you cannot understand America unless you have mastered the nature and manifold forms of Uplift. It is ubiquitous. You cannot escape it. The word is on the lips of the most responsible and sober-minded speakers. It is invaluable to the journalistic writer. The verbal currency of the social club and philanthropic committee would be helpless without it. As for the thing, the abstraction, the intangible entity-where is it not manifest and operative? Uplift is the inspiration of all the settlements and social centers; of the hunters of graft and the evangelists of the Clean City; of the Montessorians, the penal reformers, and the creators of ideal common

wealths for supposed incorrigible lads and lasses. It rings through the Sunday forums, those astonishing gatherings of men and women, composed mainly of raw new American citizens, hardly yet a step removed from Ellis Island. Uplift runs riot in the summer schools where, on hillside and by mountain lake, the earnest young graduates of the State university or normal school assemble for mutual stimulus during the long vacation. Its influence takes concrete shapes of much more than local importance. It adds the touch of idealism to the powerful and profitable journalistic industry of muckraking. It is the spring of the Good Government movement and the Prohibition crusade. Without it the new experiments in democracy entered upon so blithely by some of the Western States would lack the special enthusiasm which informs their inventors. Some, indeed, would go further still and assert that Uplift was the sole creative force of the new Progressive party which, under what seemed to us the rather incongruous leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, swept into its current so vast a number of tributary streams of political activity and social service four years ago and has since spent its force.

But what, it may be asked, is there in Uplift, as understood in America, that does not belong to the social fervor of our English leagues and guilds and brotherhoods? Much every way, as the Apostle has it. A cynically appreciative young American was in