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Mr.

VIII. They sat on in the moonlight-and on, and on, and on. About half-past ten Mr. Gale had respectfully but firmly taken Miss Etherington's hand. Miss Etherington had made a halfhearted attempt to withdraw it. Gale had apologetically but pertinaciously held on. After that they began to talk, and although they had not been out of one another's company for the best part of three months, not one of the many topics with which they had whiled away that lengthy period intruded itself into the conversation. They seemed to have turned over a new page in the book of life together. Under their eyes it lay, fair, blank, and gleaming with blessed possibilities beneath the rays of a tropical moon. And for the moment they were well content to leave it so. There would never be another hour like this. Let to-morrow, with its prosaic meticulous pen and inkhorn, stand far off and wait!

At last Miss Etherington rose.

"I am sleepy," she said. "Let me

go now."

Gale held her to him for a moment longer, caressing her loosely-knotted shimmering hair.

"Phyllis!" he murmured reverently, and raised his face skyward, as if to give thanks. From the neighborhood of his right shoulder there arose a muffled observation. For a moment he failed to take note of it, for he was gaping dumbly over Miss Etherington's head at the moonlit waters of their bay. Miss Etherington accordingly

spoke again.

"I wish," she murmured-"I wish there were a lot of people to tell."

"To tell what? That we are"-he coughed nervously-"engaged?"

"Yes. Engaged sounds queer on a desert island, doesn't it? But when a girl gets engaged she wants to tell everybody."

When I get en

"That's strange. gaged I feel that the secret is too precious to pass on to anybody. It's mine! mine! ours! ours! 'Ours'-how wonderful that sounds, after years of just 'mine.' But"-he brought his gaze back seaward again-"do you really want a crowd of people to tell your news to?"

"Yes, please," said Miss Etherington meekly.

"Well, shut your eyes, and don't open them until I tell you."

Miss Etherington obeyed. Mr. Gale rotated her carefully until she faced the calm glittering ocean.

"Abracadabra! Likewise What ho! Open your eyes!" he commanded.

Miss Etherington obeyed. There before her in the moonlight, half a mile from the shore, like a misty sea-wraith, floated a great white yacht, drifting to an anchorage. Even as they gazed there was a luminous splash, and the cable rattled out.

IX.

They were taken home next day on board the Morning Star, brought out to search for them by their host and the other survivors of the wreck.

In

For many years Mr. Leslie Gale never ceased to bless the three-masted schooner whose passing had been the means of bringing them together. fact, he exalted that nameless vessel into a fetish, ascribing to it match-making properties bordering upon the supernatural. It was Mrs. Gale who pricked the bubble.

"I wonder, old lady," observed her husband one day, "if you would ever have found out that you really cared for me if you hadn't seen that old hooker go sailing by-what?"

"I wonder," said Mrs. Gale patiently. "It was lucky," continued the fatuous Leslie, "that no ship turned up earlier on, before you had acquired a taste for me, so to speak. That would have

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Foreign Office wisdom is summed up in the text: "Never contradict the United States." It must be now close on a century since we did. About ten years since, sooner than contradict the United States, we abrogated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which set out to express the eternal determination of the contracting parties-and was in force for just fifty years. It may be we shall now have to abrogate the HayPauncefote Treaty which we then made, and that a Grey-Knox Treaty will shortly give the United States full rights to fortify the canal and the surrounding country, and to discriminate in favor of American shipping as they please. Such a treaty would, we doubt not, be followed up by an exchange of cordial telegrams between the King and the President, full of mutual congratulations on the friendly feeling between the two countries. Nothing in the present situation makes a treaty of this sort impossible. Our Foreign Office has not contradicted the United States; it has done no more than suggest that it might contradict them in certain circumstances.

The circumstances are complicated. Congress is dealing with the Panama Canal. There are two Bills, one for each House; they do not quite agree, and the exact meaning of the cardinal clause of the Senate's Bill is far from certain. What is certain is that some form of discrimination in favor of American shipping is proposed, and it is against this discrimination that the

The

British protest is being directed. text of the British note has not been published, but the summary sent to the Senate by the American State Department indicates that our Foreign Office has taken very broad ground. It protests not only against an actual remission of tolls but against a subsidy calculated with direct reference to the tolls. The one, says Britain, would be a violation of the letter, the other of the spirit of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. What then is the HayPauncefote Treaty? It replaces the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of fifty years before, is in fact the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with all the important parts of it left out. And they were very important. In the first clause of the abrogated Treaty the two Governments declared "That neither the one nor the other will ever obtain or maintain for itself any exclusive control over the said ship canal, agreeing that neither will ever erect or maintain any fortifications commanding the same or in the vicinity thereof, or occupy or fortify or colonize or assume or exercise any Dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, or any part of Central America." The strong diplomatic position thus secured to us was thrown away by Lord Lansdowne in 1901, and nothing was left to us but the satisfaction of kotowing to American views and a priori recognition of the general principle of neutralization and the acceptance by the United States of the rules governing

the neutralization of the Suez Canal. In view of what is now happening it is significant that, besides embodying those rules, the Treaty makes special mention of just and equitable treatment for the shipping of every nation. This last provision was not unnecessary-because, as our diplomatists realized at the time, the United States can easily make a beginning in the process of converting the neutralized canal into an American canal. A good deal of the traffic passing through the Canal will be traffic between Atlantic and Pacific ports of the United States. American law provides that such traffic must fly the American flag; and since only one nation is concerned a remission of tolls could not be said to be discrimination against any other nation. But an American coasting company could work in close connection with other companies doing an international trade, so that the whole spirit of the HayPauncefote Treaty would be violated. Such a violation is now threatened.. It is a curiously embarrassing circumstance that while Britain is naturally rather alarmed at the proposal to exempt American shipping from canal dues, she should be at least equally alarmed at the one exception to this proposal. The Radicals in Congress wish to levy tolls on ships belonging to American railways, and this discrimination against railway-owned vessels has caused uneasiness in Canada.

It is so rare a thing for the British Foreign Office to stand up to the United States that we do not want to appear ungrateful for this unwonted boldness. Still, the protesting does seem to have been badly managed. In the first place, why a purely British protest at all? If we are coming forward as the champions of the general principle of neutralization, why have we not associated with us the other great Powers to whom that principle must be equally dear? In the second

place, why is the whole tone of the protest, as far as it can be gathered from the summary, so very insular? As we have said, Canada is intimately concerned in this question and Canada does not trust the Foreign Office. How can she? With the possible exception of the Newfoundland fisheries question, there has never been a case in all our dealings with the States in which we have suggested that Canadian advantages should be scored in return for British sacrifices. Our diplomacy has been Little English; we have given away every point we had, and have left Canada to conclude her own treaties with her southern neighbor as best she could.

In the third place, why is this protest left in the air? A grave question of policy is raised by it, and there is no sign in the speeches of our public men that they have realized its gravity. The Americans appear more wide awake. There is a strong opposition against the critical clauses of the Panama Canal Bill among moderate men in the United States, and it is eloquent of the strength of the British case that this opposition is led by Mr. Root, who was John Hay's successor, who has himself had the bandling of a good many matters dealing with Panama, and who may therefore be trusted to appreciate the importance of the present issue. Mr. Root has very sensibly objected to the plan of the hotheads who want to go ahead and then submit to arbitration such difficulties as may occur. The verdict, Mr. Root has argued, cannot possibly be given until the canal has been open for some time, and if it prove adverse to the Americans, will mean that the States must return the money that they have collected from foreign ships. In other words, the cost of maintaining the canal will be thrown wholly on the American tax-payer, who is, after all, not always a millionaire. But it is unlikely to go to arbitration

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It is,

At this really critical point for if the Senate passes the Bill in defiance of our protest the crisis will be acuteour Ambassador is away making speeches in another continent. indeed, what we should expect of Mr. Bryce, and no patriotic Englishman need regret his absence. At the same time an Ambassador with a right sense of duty would be on the spot to deal with the most difficult situation that has arisen since the Venezuela trouble. Possibly our protest has lost weight through having been presented by a mere chargé d'affaires; at any rate, that point has been taken by some American newspapers. But Mr. Mitchell-Innes is a good man to have the handling of the matter, provided he is allowed to handle it. There is always the danger that Sir Edward Grey, finding himself suddenly confronted with a The Saturday Review.

big issue, will cable to Australia for Mr. Bryce's opinion and will act upon the inevitable advice to give way. But if Mr. Innes is given a chance, he should make the most of it. Our interests require a Panama Canal which shall be a second Suez Canal and not a second Dardanelles, and Mr. Innes, with his Egyptian experience, can explain to the Americans how traffic in the Suez Canal is worked. But the man on the spot is powerless unless adequately supported at home, and it is essential that the facts should be appreciated not only by Ministers but by the leaders of the Opposition, that a lead may be given to British opinion. The position is that the Americans are on their way to assert absolute control over the Panama Canal. That canal lies directly on the line of communication between Britain and Australia, and perhaps India too. American control over it will throttle the British Empire. Germans chafe at the British fleet coming between their ports and the world beyond them. But what is that to a foreign Power lying right across the main communication between one part of our Empire and another?

GAMES VERSUS ATHLETICS

were

The Olympic games, which founded to encourage friendly competition-which was assumed to be the same thing as competitive friendliness -among the nations, have brought their quadrennial harvest of repining and recrimination. If this kind of thing goes on the disputes at the Olympic games will some day add to the labors of the Hague, and we shall not even be able to congratulate ourselves on new triumphs for arbitration, since the matters in dispute will be entirely superfluous creations. We do not, however, suggest that we should get on

better without the Olympic games. Now that the difficulty of taking part in them in a sweetly reasonable frame of mind is patent, it would be more damaging to the ethics of a sporting people to run away from the difficulty than to face it and conquer it. As a nation we have not very much to blame ourselves for in the direction of gratuitously accusing other people of cheating or of jeering at those who have been less successful than they hoped to be. Those are the faults of other nations.

Our own lapses are rather to exag

gerate ludicrously the importance of winning contests in which an extraordinary degree of specialization is necessary for success, and to fly into a panic of apprehension that our ancient physical aptness and fitness are deserting us. It is pretended that if we do not win the greatest number of points in the Olympic games we-the inventors and exemplars of every kind of healthy and manful sport-must necessarily sink in the esteem of the world, and must suffer from all kinds of challenges to our position, which would never have been thought of if our champions had not cut a sorry figure in the Olympic Stadium. A very good instance of the cries of alarm to which we refer is an article by Mr. Beach Thomas in the Daily Mail. calls our failure to score more points than the United States or Sweden a "scandal," and argues that patriotism requires us to perfect an organization and system of training for the next Olympic games-which will be at Berlin, so think of the Olympian laughter of the Prussians! In other words, a serious business is to be made of the games, and whatever money is necessary must be poured out in order to "organize victory" and redeem our fallen prestige.

He

We disagree with all this. Mr. Beach Thomas was a fine runner and an excellent President of the Oxford University Athletic Club; but he is now, we think, seeing things out of perspective. Excessive specialization is the one thing we ought to avoid. It is not worth while. Of course, if what Mr. Beach Thomas wants can be achieved by simply doing well anything that we profess to do, while still behaving like reasonable beings and amateur sportsmen-and we know that as a good sportsman that is all he really desires then we would rather beat everybody else at the Olympic games than not beat them. But we foresee

that in order to accumulate the necessary number of points to come out ahead of the United States on the list undesirable specialization will be indispensable. Rather than reverse our ancient habit of playing games and following sports for the love of the thing we would say quite deliberately and good-humoredly: "This is going a bit too far. If our recreations are to be a labor, and are to add a new business to our existing business, instead of a means of escape, then we think they have got on to the wrong lines. You say that others have learned from us Englishmen, and that now we are disgracing ourselves by being beaten at our own game. All we can reply to that is that in one very important particular the other nations have learned wrong." There is something admirable, no doubt, in the willingness of Englishmen to stand in a white sheet and publicly proclaim their failings. Other nations do not do this. We trust that it will be counted to us some day for righteousness. But in this case, is there not an almost universal agreement to forget in a passion of morbid humility what our métier as sportsmen has always been? We have always thought more about games than about athletics.

If this distinction between games and athletics is not a perfectly exact one it will nevertheless be generally understood: Both at public schools and at the universities the good cricketer, the good football player, and the good oarsman enjoy more popular esteem than the runner, the weight-putter, or the hammer-thrower. This is not exactly Olympic or Isthmian in spirit, perhaps, but it happens to be the fact. The athletes of Olympia and Corinth were probably highly self-centred and selfish men. It is a good thing that in English games and pastimes most kudos belongs to those in which the unselfishness of effective combination is

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