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had the Kaiser done in return but let his Government, with the aid of the Blue-black Block, put still more taxation on the living of the people? Then came a delightful bit of play with the Kaiser's speeches; especially with his famous saying "that if a soldier were called to fire on his father and mother, he must obey." In a passage of really powerful eloquence, the speaker declared that for these words ever to have been uttered meant that the Kaiser contemplated using his army against his own subjects—and against what subjects? Of course the Social Democrats. Four million citizens, who patiently worked and paid their taxes to keep the Kaiser and his friends were really regarded by their Kaiser as enemies much more to be feared than the foes without. If any of those foes without were to attack our Fatherland, we should all be ready to take our arms in defence. But for the Social Democrats to be regarded as foes to be trodden down, ridden down, and possibly shot down-that was intolerable! It must be stopped by winning Parliamentary control, by obtaining a Reichstag majority. It is just because the Socialists face the issues with such courage, conviction, and clear policy as I heard Ledebour thus eloquently express, that they go on growing, and seem likely to grow, in numbers and power.

The other passage in this speech which I will recall was where the speaker discussed the Morocco question, and the menace of war which had grown out of it. His line was the usual criticism which the Socialists have without any reservation boldly taken from first to last-that the colonial policy, which the Government tried so successfully in 1907 to raise as a patriotic cry against Social Democracy, was a pricked bubble; it had led to the resignation of Bülow and Dernburg, and no one was talking colonial

policy to-day. The German colonies were an economic failure, costing far more than they brought in, maintained to foster a false Imperialism and to give opportunities to big capitalists, financiers, and speculators. That was the whole secret of Morocco. The German claims were made to get up a popular election cry. It was part of the financier's game. Neither Morocco nor all the German colonies were worth a war to the German worker. Trade with them was insignificant. No part of the world was unoccupied or available, which could support the surplus population of the Fatherland. The real solution was peaceful relations towards all nations. This could only be secured by the proletariat of all lands uniting on the basis of Social Democracy. What good would it do to the nation to let the financiers make full use of the incapable aristocrats and plutocrats, who alone were admitted into the Diplomatic Service and Foreign Office? There was no need whatever, therefore, for the increase of army and navy. If they wanted to be secure against any attack or invasion at home, let them have a citizen army on the Swiss system. In Switzerland, every able-bodied man took his turn, learned his drill, and was proud to have his rifle at home, ready any moment to protect his native land; but not to be used in any other cause. That was what Social Democracy approved. But what an idea! Just fancy the Kaiser, to whom 4,000,000 of his subjects were men to be ridden or shot down, approving these enemies of the Fatherland keeping their rifles ready at home!

This line of argument has been consistently and constantly expressed by the Social Democrats all through the campaign. Conservatives have shouted for bigger army and navy, but not even they have been wild enough to propose such preparations as would overawe at

once France and England together both on land and sea. It is the Conservatives who have lost seats and votes, the Social Democrats who have gained.

During my fortnight in Germany I spoke, of course, with many persons on Anglo-German relations. With retired ministers, professors, journalists, and others outside the political fighting forces, and with candidates and active politicians of very different groups. There is undoubtedly among many a deep feeling of distrust, disappointment, and even dread of British policy. The belief that our diplomacy is always being directed to thwart Germany all over the world was freely admitted to

me.

The conviction was expressed by men who surprised me by acknowledging it as they did, that the British navy was more than once last year within a few hours of attacking the German fleet or invading German waters. The irresponsible utterances of Captain Faber were taken as authoritative proofs of this intention. The recent espionage cases in Germany have been like lighted matches thrown about in a carpenter's shop littered with shavings. General distrust and even despair of good relations between the Governments was allowed by men who declared that the peoples as a whole were anxious to trade together, live in peace, and join in a common civilization.

Two views were repeated from very different quarters, which I venture to give as suggestive. The earnestness with which these two points of view were emphasized by very different men impressed me deeply. First of all (they said), do not make speeches or say anything at all just yet, unless you can do something at the same time: The Contemporary Review.

and seek out something to do, rather than something to say. When I asked what can we Englishmen do, many things were suggested or discussed. I will only mention one. A man of the highest experience and authority said to me, "Don't you Englishmen go about talking and behaving as if our increase of our fleet, to make it commensurate with our expanding commerce and our world-wide interests, were undertaken as if we meant to invade England. We are not fools. Don't you be fools either."

The other view expressed to me more than once was that the real struggle coming in the world is not between Germany and England, but between yellow man and white man, between the Western Christian civilization of Europe and the Eastern non-Christian civilization of Asia. What may not China become in a few years? May it not be a greater military force than Germany, a greater expanding or colonizing force than England? The common civilization of Germany and England must go hand in hand; otherwise the world's hegemony will pass from

us.

Here, as in many things in German politics, one sees how the German is a philosopher and historical student. In this, as in many things, he is so different from the Englishman.

At the end of my fortnight as an onlooker of the German elections, the abiding feeling is that an Englishman can be easily at home in Germany if he tries to understand, by patient personal intercourse, the nation which alone disputes with his own the right to be viewed as the greatest progressive nation in Europe.

Joseph King.

DIANA OF THE HIGHWAYS.

With the exception of our First Mother, of whose trek into the Wilderness the poet might well have written his

"Necessità l'induce, e non diletto,"

and of Lot's wife, whose travels were early determined by a tragedy that should be a warning to curious wives for all time, the only notable woman traveller of Bible story, of whose possible route we have some geographical idea, was the Queen of Sheba. There are few monuments to this redoubtable lady, but she has a place of honor in a window of Exeter Cathedral, and, judging by the story of her enterprise, she seems to have been a worthy forerunner of all the African travellers that came after. Impressed with the hearsay of Solomon's wealth and wisdom, she set out in state from her kingdom to see for herself this paragon among kings, and to ply him with hard questions. These he appears to have had no difficulty in answering, and, before returning home, she showered on him gifts of golds, jewels, and spices. The Arabs, many of whose traditions dovetail curiously with Jewish history, preserve among their chroniques scanda beuses

not without interest. It avails little that in civilized countries she is still regarded as the weaker vessel. During a recent tour of Brittany I was told that, on more than one island of that broken coast, it is the women who propose marriage, and there are still a few other isolated spots, outside of Mr. Rider Haggard's fertile imagination, such as Nunivak, in the Behring Sea, where they rule in name as well as in fact. The ruler of Sheba was not only the first recorded queen in her own right; she was also the first woman on record to travel through Africa, heading the glorious. list that contains the name of Mary Kingsley.

Miss Kingsley was perhaps the most courageous, as she was surely among the most intellectual, of all African In one travellers, irrespective of sex. of the worst regions of West Africa she studied with wonderful patience fetish, fishes, and the weakness of Crown Colony Government, and her memoirs prove her to have combined, as perhaps no other woman has combined, the qualities that go to make a lovable woman with those which are looked for in a great man. She coveted none of the cheap records of literary globe-trot

She lacked the ambition to travel thousands of miles on horseback or in palanquins, but went unostentatiously about her work, living among black men till she came to know the good and the bad in them, as those who sit in judgment at Whitehall have never known the millions for whom they make laws. Having assembled the facts, she was not wanting in the courage to speak her mind, and she calmly said to a distinguished audience at the Imperial Institute: "The African you have got in your minds up here, that you are legislating for and spending millions on trying to improve,

ters. memories of the love-sick queen, and they claim that sundry stone ruins, still to be seen in the Zambesian goldfields, are the remains of her capital. Hereabouts, also, as tradition has it, was the site of Ophir, the land from which Solomon obtained his sea-borne gold, and in that region gynarchy has from time immemorial been a recognized institution. Dusky over men, and queens have ruled Amazon regiments have been enrolled for the maintenance of law and order. Now that the supremacy of women is a topic so much in the public eye, this African origin of her emancipation is

I

doesn't exist; your African is a fancy African." I remember reading, in the report of a speech made at Manchester by Mrs. Wilson Burt, a remark to the effect that "A woman seldom learns anything by travel. She is too busy." Here is an extraordinary statement. am fearful of blundering, as any man might well be who should undertake to defend against its own friends the sex he admires without understanding, but it is quite certain that Mrs. Burt must be ignorant of the life-work of Mary Kingsley, a far greater woman than any who achieve the notoriety of the evening paper by screaming on platforms, and withal so modest that when someone, saying no more than the bare truth, described her as "an intrepid explorer," she protested. "A thing," she wrote, "there is not the making of in me, who am ever the prey of frights, worries, and alarms." If this was indeed a true picture of her state of mind during those lonely times in the heart of Africa, then, indeed, there was something grand in her enthusiasm for the cause she had embraced. Her courage mounted with occasion, and she, perhaps the most illustrious member of a clever family, met her death characteristically while devotedly nursing Boer prisoners at Simonstown.

This is the age of Woman. Her political aspirations I gladly leave out of the argument, but in art, music, literature, sport, and travel, she has arrived, coming into her own, not by talking on hustings or battling with constables. but by a slower and surer process of evolution that is making her more and more man's comrade and less and less his chattel. It needs time and training to fit her for contact with the rough world, and the instincts of centuries of repression die hard. A great deal of nonsense has been written of the yearning of the harem to pull down the curtain that shuts it in, and some color is lent to this view by the report

of emancipated Eastern women begging the present ruler of Turkey to free them from their social slavery. Yet I have been privileged to talk with one or two Turkish ladies on the subject, and found in them nothing but contempt for the personality we know as the New Woman. To throw open the doors of the Seraglio, and to turn these delicately nurtured women suddenly adrift, would be no less outrageous than setting some feeble tropical bird at liberty in the depth of an English winter, for such freedom can be a boon only after gradual acclimatization to the new conditions. The freedom of the road is even more perilous, and it is due to the tyranny of convention that the gap between the Queen of Sheba and Miss Kingsley should be dotted with only a few names of women of fashion who, like Lady Hester Stanhope and Lady Mary Montagu, made the then modish Grand Tour. It would be idle to pretend that any living woman has accomplished anything equivalent to Miss Kingsley's record, for the fruits of travel are not to be measured by mere mileage, any more than by an aftermath of elaborate books with the latest results of modern photography. It is also true that no woman has hitherto succeeded in writing another Eothen, but neither, for the matter of that, has any man. Leav ing that exceptional volume in a category by itself, it seems to me that Miss Lowthian Bell's Amurath to Amurath is equal to any other work of travel in print, and I have pleasant recollections of some impressions of Damascus in one of the magazines in which she was, if anything, even more convincing than in her book. Such faculty of observation, with a saving sense of humor that can scarcely be claimed as the birthright of her sex, is a gift for which Miss Bell and her readers must alike give thanks; however, the fact that a separate article, written by a sister

traveller, has already appeared on the subject in these pages, precludes anything beyond this too casual tribute of homage to a work so immeasurably su perior to the majority of those written for people who, on the strength of a subscription to Mudie's or The Times Book Club, get round the world by proxy in less than eighty days, smelling the scented East and sensing the virgin West without danger or discomfort.

The question of how far Woman, in the abstract, is fitted for the wear and tear of the road, for the monotony and privations of camp life, the rigors and the risks of mountain travel, the brutality of the frozen North, the exhaustion of the steaming jungle, the perils of water, the buffets of weather, the encounters with unfriendly natives, or the greater hazard of others too friendly -this question is best resolved, so far as it is logical to argue from the particular case to the general proposition, by reference to the books of travel written by women on returning to civilization. On the whole, they appear to go through the ordeal quite as bravely as the men, though more sensitive, no doubt, to the absence of such refinements of the home-life as men on trek miss very little. Out of these amazingly interesting records, considered as a whole, one fact stands above the rest, and that is that women who have achieved fame on the long trail have fared alone. As much might, perhaps, be said of notable explorers of the other sex, but in the case of women it has peculiar significance. I am nervous of treading on delicate ground, but it amounts, briefly, to this: that the companionship of man is apt to rob a woman of her independence and initiative, and the companionship of other women is equally apt to breed rivalry, divided counsels, and a premature return home. To this hardy preference for solitary pioneering there have, how

ever, been distinguished exceptions which we cannot afford to overlook. Many intrepid ladies have, like Eve, gone forth into the wilderness with their husbands, proving themselves helpmates in every sense, and the names of Lady Baker and Lady Burton at once suggest themselves in this connection. Other successful expeditions have been performed by two women together. Miss Agnes Deans Cameron and her niece journeyed, by way of the Peace and Mackenzie Rivers, to the frozen shore of the Arctic, where Eskimos live through the long winter in their igloos; and Miss Agnes Herbert and her friend have achieved fame as "Two Dianas" in Somaliland, Alaska, and the Caucasus, or rather, to be more accurate, in the first two regions, since one of them appears, before travelling to the third, to have forfeited the right of comparison with the goddess whose heart never yielded to love. These ladies, however, whose main object was sport, seem to have conducted their travels with an attention to personal comfort that distinguishes their experiences from the rough-and-tumble of ordinary wayfaring; but Miss Herbert clearly knows the secret of going in safety among savages. "Anyone," she writes in her latest book, "who travels round with the 'God help me!' air of the average Cook's tourist is bound to be held up sooner or later." This is absolutely a fact, and there are many of my own sex who would be the better for the knowledge that wild men, like wild dogs, cringe to the whip, yet are quick to devour those who run from them. Such partnerships might not, of course, always be attended by the same happy results. "I believe," wrote Lady Mary Pierrepont, when contemplating elopement with Wortley Montagu, "that to travel is the most likely way to make a solitude agreeable and not tiresome." It is probable that a solitude à deux, "the world for

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