of her creations. The scene is in Old Chester; dear old Doctor Lavendar reappears, as do Willy King and Martha and others of the familiar group; but the central figures-the woman, and the little child through whose influence her nature is revealed and transformed-are both new-comers. David is one of the most charming child-characters anywhere to be found in fiction, utterly naïve and natural, without the slightest consciousness of having a part in the working out of a problem. Absorbingly interesting as a story, subtle and penetrating as a psychological study, high and resolute in its morality, the book takes a strong hold on the imagination and emotions. The characters are real people, not puppets: they stir the sympathies of the reader like real people: there is no obtrusion of a moral: but in their relations to each other they preach a sermon as searching, as austere, and yet as benign as any that ever fell from the lips of good Doctor Lavendar himself. Regarded from whatever point of view-for its readable qualities, for its literary art, or for its significance and suggestiveness as a social study-the book is by all odds the most powerful that the present season has given us. Harper & Bros.

Everyman's Library, as explained by the publishers, E. P. Dutton & Co., is an attempt to form a collection of books in uniform dress on lines so elastic and comprehensive that practically every classic in the language shall be available in an attractive and permanent form at the lowest price consistent with a worthily made book. This is a large scheme but it has been entered upon in a way which gives promise of satisfactory fulfilment. Already, one hundred books in various departments of literature,-biography, fiction, poetry, travels, belles lettres, philosophy, sci

ence, theology, etc.-have been produced; and it is the intention of the publishers to add one hundred volumes a year. Except that in the cloth bindings there is a different shade for each group,-crimson for fiction, brown for essays, gray for science, dark green for travel, pale green for the classics, etc., -the volumes are uniform. The type is large and clear, the paper thin and opaque, the binding substantial and attractive. The format is in all particulars what might be expected from the English publishers, J. M. Dent & Co. who created the Temple Classics and the Temple Shakespeare. Each volume has a decorative title-page and a motto of its own. The whole series is edited by Professor Ernest Rhys; and the separate books are furnished with introductions and notes by such writers as Hilaire Belloc, Andrew Lang, G. K. Chesterton, Mr. Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Augustine Birrell, George Saintsbury, Walter Jerrold, Sir Oliver Lodge, Lord Avebury, and others equally distinguished. The volumes are not too large to be carried in the pocket, if one will, but they are of a size to adorn a bookshelf. Whoever enters upon the gradual acquisition of these delightful books, selecting here and there as the humor seizes him from the different groups, will find upon his shelves a lengthening row of pleasing volumes, uniform but not monotonous, pleasing to the eye, easy to hold, and tempting in their contents. When it is remembered that the price of each volume is only fifty cents, it is hazarding little to affirm that the general title of the series will prove to be amply justified by the fact that "every man" who reads at all and indulges himself in the ownership of any books will possess himself of the whole or a part of this library.

Thy brother asked for help and protection; thou remainest deaf to his appeal; thou hast not gone to his assistance, therefore thou hast killed him."Quoted from "An Early Christian Father," by M. Vandervelde in the Belgian Congo debate.

Perhaps the most disquieting fact in the present state of the world is the frequent triumph of acknowledged wrong. Both in the Old World and the New-here unhappily not redressing the balance of the Old-the forces of evil seem to be more powerful and impudent than they were a score of years ago. Disclosure does not dismay them; that great universal judgment of the human race, once armed with thunderbolts, seems now more frightened of itself than capable of alarming others; the vast powers of the modern community, with its highly centralized government and its gigantic machinery of agitation and publicity, seem easily defeated and disarmed, or even turned, like captured cannon, against the common good. We still lock up the smaller criminals; but the colossus seems beyond our reach. He sins boldly and defiantly, seated on throne or judgment seat, in the very blaze of noon. seems safely guarded by some new stagnancy of the common world-conscience. We look back with scepticism to the days when Mr. Gladstone with a few bold letters could rouse the whole of Europe into a flame of wrath against King Bomba's "Negation of God." Now, Abdul Hamid still reigns. Tales of wrong seem to produce less echo in the "armed camp" of 1906 than in the peaceful mart of 1850.

He

But every other instance of this new malady pales before the continued survival, after fifteen years of crime, of the Independent Congo Free State.

The "heart of Africa" is far off, and we listen but fitfully to its beats. Our own lives are crowded, and stories of misery are but weary reading. Our own Empire engrosses us, and we have not time for the world-crusades of our forefathers. There is something in the very size and monotony of this great Congo oppression which irritates rather than stimulates the modern man, fatigues his imagination and overloads his sympathies. He thinks dimly of the tortured native as Childe Roland'

'in Browning's poem thinks of the "stiff, blind horse":

He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

We could believe a lesser crime and gird on our armor to redress it; but when we hear of more than 15,000,000 human beings-half the estimated population of this Congo State-being "ruled" by a system which in its very nature must mean slavery in the present, and probably means extermination in the future, of a yearly toll of lives that amounts, according to moderate calculations, to 100,000, of murder, kidnapping, mutilation and massacre used by a professedly Christian administration as ordinary methods of rule, we take refuge in incredulity. We cannot at once-thank God!-believe so badly of our fellow human beings. There is nothing in previous history, not in the records of Attila or Timur or Nadir Shah, to prepare us for anything quite so monstrous, so deliberate, so fiendish, so continuous, so defiant. The very immensity of the evil disarms us. We vaguely seek for some relief, and have hitherto found it in the organized and subsidized contradictions of a freely endowed Continental Press, or in the leaflets so obligingly scattered through

the Wagon-Lits of Europe to while away the idle hours of travel.

But now, in the Report of the 1905 Commission,' the whole horror and infamy of the Congo rule stands confessed and revealed to the world; and it becomes the duty of those who remember to remind the European world that they, too, stand directly responsible for the lives of these Congo natives, under the Sixth Article of that Berlin Treaty by which, in 1885, this great region was handed over in trust to Leopold II.:

All the Powers exercising sovereign rights or influence in the aforesaid territories bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being, and to help in suppressing slavery, and especially the slave trade.

This was doubtless the article to which Sir Edward Grey not obscurely alluded in his reply to Mr. Wedgewood in the House of Commons on June 14th, and King Leopold may yet find that alike in the defiance to Europe contained in the letter accompanying the latest batch of so-called "Reforms," and in the reply of his agent to Sir Arthur Hardinge,' he has overlooked the spirit prevailing in the present British House of Commons.

But the danger is lest Europe may again allow itself to be lulled into passivity by "reforms" which can have no possible effect as long as the main system of exploitation is left untouched.

For the security of King Leopold lies 1 See Abstract issued by the Congo Reform Association, 4, Oldhall Street, Liverpool.

* See M. de Cuvelier's dispatch of April 19th and his interview with Sir Arthur Hardinge on May 11th (Parliamentary Paper Cd. 3,002). The King's attitude is best summed up in Sir Arthur's report of M. de Cuvelier's language:" He thereupon said, although not very decisively, that even on the absurd as

in the very magnitude of his offences. He has sinned beyond all ordinary credibility; and he has proved so successful in his large drafts on the bank of international good faith that he will not hesitate to go on drawing as long as his "schemes" are honored. In the past we have been taken unawares, but now we know, and our guilt will be all the greater if we allow ourselves to go on being deceived. For a new thing has appeared in the world. While we have been dreaming of progress and benevolence, there has grown up among us a strange product, born of the union between greed and science, suckled on cynicism and schooled in the subtleties of the law. It is nothing less than a civilized savagery, infinitely more dangerous and terrible than primitive barbarism, because free from all passion, and working in an atmosphere of cold and sinister calculation that admits neither reform nor repentance. It is fortified by a moneyed command of brain-power in every country, and armed in its own work with all the machinery of destruction that science has given to the modern man. This new savagery is not without its champions. A certain vague popular philosophy that has become "procuress to the Lords of Hell" is ready to justify the "OverMan," whether he reigns in Brussels or Chicago. Deception is among his avowed weapons, and the folly of mankind is his chief asset. Here lies, let us clearly understand, the chief peril of the modern world.

Now, King Leopold has shown himself the boldest master in this new school of "State-craft"; and he has given us such ample experience of his sumption that the Free State were to establish slavery, the other parties to the Berlin Act could not legally interfere, and that the engagements I had quoted were a declaration of general principles and intentions as regarded the treatment of the native populations rather than a binding obligation which the remaining signatories, or any one of them, had a right to enforce."