their inscriptions. When that of the Duke of Cambridge was set up in Whitehall, it was discovered that a wrong date had been carved on the pedestal; the more famous one of James the Second by Grinling Gibbons

a much moved statue, having, within my memory alone, been changed as to its site three times has a glaring error of Latinity in its inscription, an error which officialdom, after two hundred and odd years, has not yet discovered, or at least rectified.

THO

HOSE who have studied old plans of London have observed various streams running through the city from north to south, and may not unnaturally wonder why they are not to be met with to-day. As a matter of fact, they still exist, but like so many of London's necessary adjuncts, they are now underground. If we could raise the wood paving of Farringdon Road and New Bridge Street, we should find the Fleet Stream still washing its way to the river from its northern heights; could we for the nonce be navvies, armed with pickaxes, we could at length penetrate the roadway to the Westbourne

Stream which flows in a sewer beneath it, coming out of the Park by way of Albert Gate, and crossing the railway line at Sloane Square station like some great serpent, incidentally preventing the much needed reconstruction of that portion of the Metropolitan Railway.

There is curiosity,

even romance some

times, in the very street names of London. Some are obvious enough, a few-but far fewer than in Paris, for example-perpetuate great men; but as a rule they are either those of former ground landlords, otherwise unknown to fame, or they recall some feature which has

speaks for itself and recaptures for us a rusticity curiously alien from that spot to-day; so does Hay Hill, off Berkeley Street, opposite the little but famous Lansdowne Passage, happily still preserved, in spite of wholesale demolition and rebuilding in this quarter. Quality Court, in Chancery Lane, whose remaining old Georgian houses are condemned and on the point of destruction, was so named because of the fashionable character of its inhabitants and the excellence of its houses. In 1720, about the time it was constructed, it was known as New Court, but the more charming and original title given it by common consent has stuck to it ever since. You will no longer find a Hop Enden in Saint Martin's Lane, but the Court of Mist is there to show the former presence of one. As you wander about the streets, that period is here and there recalled by the matured red brick of two centuries of London dirt and smoke, as well as by some of the shop fronts (gradually disappearing as these are) to be found in the purlieus of Soho, and, now that Birch's from Cornhill is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, in its most picturesque manifestation by Freyburg's tobacco shop in the Haymarket. That Haymarket really was

Frederick Keppel & Company SAINT GILES IN THE FIELDS FROM A LITHOGRAPH BY J. A. MCN. WHISTLER

long since disappeared from our midst. Windmill Street, off Piccadilly Circus, Windmill Street, off Piccadilly Circus,

STEPS, BRITISH MUSEUM

FROM AN ETCHING BY JOSEPH PENNELL

Frederick Keppel & Company

one in those days, a kind of offshoot of Saint James's Mar

ket, which was swept away when Nash created Lower Regent Street. Indeed, none of the many little markets that once existed as necessary adjuncts to building development-Clare Market, Oxford Market, and the rest remains, save Shepherd's Market in Mayfair, which Mr. Shepherd set up when he built the houses around it. He himself lived in what was then the most important of them, Crewe House, with its garden, which, one fears, will soon follow the

fate of those of other great mansions having this charming adjunct-Devonshire House, Grosvenor House, and so forth.

HE other day,

THE

SO

ciety hostess bade her guests come dressed in Victorian clothes, and in hansom cabs, to an entertainment she was organizing. But where could sufficient numbers of these once popular vehicles be found? I did see a stray one recently, and there is one in the London Museum. But they are now almost as démodés as Sedan chairs, or horse omnibuses, or the red-coated shoeblacks who once dotted and incarnadined the London streets. Even a carriage and pair is an infrequent sight, and the meet of the Four-in-Hand Club, every year in Hyde Park, is like a reconstructed scene from the Victorian era. One remembers the time when a self-respecting Londoner would no more have been seen in the regions of fashion without a top hat than he would have been seen in knickerbockers. To-day people walk about in Piccadilly and Pall Mall in the afternoon in plus fours, and a top hat betokens that you have either been or are going to a wedding or a funeral, or that you are a bank porter, that excellent class which remains sartorially more royalist than the King himself.

Indeed, one of the greatest curiosities of the London streets is those changes of fashion in dress which mark the progress of time and events more, even, than do changes in architecture. For it is a strange but undeniable fact that in spite of a quite remarkable evolution in the former,

349

indeed, in the way of living itself, in the latter there is a strong tendency to 'throw back' to an earlier age, so that the neo-Georgians find themselves living in houses which ape the decorative character of those of the Victorian and the earlier Georgian period; and while ladies wear their hair bobbed and their dresses audaciously tenuous, they surround themselves by the glass-shaded ware prints and the painted, inlaid, and mother-ofpearled tea trays of their grandmothers' more rococo days.

past and over the mansions of a day still earlier, even past and over something remaining here of Wren and there of Inigo Jones until they reach the Tower on the Norman battlements on which floats the same flag that we have seen floating over the pseudo-Gothic of Barry, where the Mother of Parliaments sits and talks to-day, as it has sat and talked for a thousand years. Were Dr. Johnson alive to-dayand those who believe in reincarnation may perhaps imagine he is, not improbably in the guise of a Scotch laird - he would have more reason than ever to say that the full tide of human existence is to be seen at Charing Cross, but whether he would still affirm that Fleet Street is more delightful than Tempe is a question which the present writer, who knows both, does not feel himself altogether competent to judge.

T

C. T. WANG

HE die-hards of Peking's diplomatic corps point to him as a horrible example of the results of foreign education the Sino-American returned student turned Bolshevik and metaphorically running amuck among the age-old traditions of his people. He belongs to a new breed, this 'C. T.'-this first Chinese diplomat ever to sit in the Waichiao-pu and to be known wherever foreigners gather throughout the length and breadth of China by the American appellative of big business. With the possible exception of Dr. Wellington Koo, foreign ministers have come and gone during the decade and a half of China's republic with few foreigners the wiser, but with the appointment of His Excellency Wang Cheng-t'ing, A.B., LL.D., Phi Beta Kappa, etc., by the Nationalist government, following the Kuomintang's entry into Peking, a new era in China's relations with the outside world began.

Paradoxical though it may seem, it is Dr. Wang's uncanny ability to anticipate the way a foreigner's mind works without losing for a moment his clear perspective of the problems confronting the Chinese people that has raised him head and shoulders above his contemporaries. Although this is by no means the first time that 'C. T.' has held a Cabinet portfolio, he has served ad interim in several other ministries, it is the first occasion that he has held such an important post so long, with excellent prospects of holding it indefinitely, provided only that he can rise above the storm of Japanese adverse propaganda, which at times seriously threatens to capsize his ship of state.

-

who is not blinded by the gleam of Japanese gold yen. In point of fact, he comes nearer to being a Chinese patriot than any Chinese I have ever known, since he invariably puts country before self, a maxim that by reason of its platonic altruism is little known in Asia.

HIS EXCELLENCY WANG CHENG-T'ING

assigned to a native church in a suburb adjacent to China's commercial capital.

For the most part the youthful Wang was educated in the Methodist mission schools of Shanghai, but at an early age he was sent to Japan to learn the lan

guage, as well as to complete his secondary education. He returned to Shanghai for a year of college and in competitive examination won a scholarship which carried with it the perquisite of coming to America. As a Yale undergraduate he was unusually popular with his class, played baseball, made the debating team, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude. Subsequently, he received honorary degrees from the universities of Peking and St. John..

Dr. Wang returned to China during the parlous times of the 'Old Buddha's' régime, and at once threw himself into the work of reorganizing the Young Men's Christian Association, particularly with regard to its activities in assisting Chinese students who had been educated abroad in finding employment in their homeland. It was not long before his zeal, resourcefulness, and plain common sense achieved marked results and won for him the undying gratitude of the men whom he had assisted, as well as bringing him to the favorable notice of his superiors. Less than three years after his return to China he had advanced through successive steps until he was elected national Chinese secretary of the Y. M. C. A.

C. T. Wang is one of the very few Chinese statesmen feared by Japan, feared because he is one of the very few

But why should this Chinese statesman not be guided in the main by altruism since he is a product almost exclusively of the Occident, despite the fact that he was born of Chinese parents in Shanghai? His father was an early convert to Christianity and, shortly before Cheng-t'ing's birth, took orders in the Methodist ministry and was

Although 'C. T.' was not among the zealots who stormed the Imperial Palace gates in Peking demanding a Constitutional form of government in 1911, nevertheless he did yeoman service in rousing the returned Chinese students to a proper appreciation of their enormous responsibilities of government.

Throughout this whole period of transition it was Dr. Wang's voice that interpreted the revolutionary movement in terms which the foreigner could understand. It is not surprising that he was elected by acclamation a member of the first Chinese parliament, an office which he has held almost continually ever since, when not serving as minister with portfolio.

Shortly after his return to Shanghai, 'C. T.' met Dr. Sun Yat-sen, whose fighting spirit and devotion to the cause of revolution found a most sympathetic adherent in the youthful Dr. Wang. Intensely practical both by nature and inheritance, it was 'C. T.' who invariably discovered a modus vivendi to bring Dr. Sun's visions down to earth; to make practical application of his glittering generalities; and, diplomatically at least, to pilot the youngest republic through the dangerous rapids of entangling foreign alliances.

It was not until after the close of the World War, however, that Dr. Wang became an international figure in diplomacy. As a member of the Chinese mission to the Versailles Peace Conference, he alone remained unaffected by the prestige of the 'Big Four,' - Wilson, Clemenceau, Balfour, and Lloyd George, -and, when Lloyd George advised the Chinese to accept the treaty, including provisions which gave Japan jurisdiction over the wealthy Chinese province of Shantung, a proviso which the Chinese had fought against bitterly for months, C. T.' uttered his famous battle cry of 'China for the Chinese' and stated that he would prefer to cut his hand off rather than sign such a treaty.

Dr. Wang's firm stand in rejecting the treaty proved a milestone in diplomatic history, because the Shantung clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were largely instrumental in causing the United States Senate to refuse to ratify it, thereby cementing still closer the ties of friendship between China and America.

'C. T.'s' next appearance on the stage of world politics was as emissary to Moscow to conduct pourparlers looking toward the diplomatic recognition by China of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. He went to Russia at the special request of his friend and mentor, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who had completely fallen under the spell cast by Lenin, Yoffe, Karakhan, and Borodin - the last a prominent member of the Third International, and sent to China by the Soviet Central Committee to assist Dr. Sun in his revolutionary aspirations.

Dr. Wang's mission was only partially successful, for while recognition was

PERSONS AND PERSONAGES

accorded the Soviet, and the appointment of Comrade Karakhan as first ambassador to the Republic of China confirmed, the actual trade treaties were never ratified by the Chinese parliament.

During the Customs Conference of 1925-26 with all the Protocol Powers participating, it was C. T. Wang's voice, polite but insistent as always, firmly demanding recognition by the powers of China's right to tariff autonomy. In fact, tariff autonomy and revision of the so-called unequal treaties have been two of Dr. Wang's political pets ever since he was old enough to hold office.

In her present hour of travail, China is fortunate indeed to have a man of Dr. Wang's ability to guide her diplomatic destinies with a sure hand. He is slim, slight, with the somewhat quizzical expression of a college professor, a charming, frank manner, a quiet, merry laugh that bubbles forth even when the joke is at his own expense (a very unusual attribute in a Chinese), a calm, logical thinker, yet one who after mapping out a course of action has sufficient initiative, resourcefulness, and ability to carry his plan through even in face of the greatest opposition.

This, in brief, is a picture of the man who 'rejoiced to be able to sign the American pact outlawing war'; who was among the very first of the foreign diplomats to offer his personal congratulations to Mr. Hoover; who at this moment is working out a solution of the problems confronting China in connection with the Tanaka Ministry in Japan, which is busily seeking an excuse to recapture Shantung as reprisal for alleged recent outrages committed by Chinese Nationalist troopsHis Excellency Wang Cheng-t'ing,

351

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China, and spokesman to the world for his four hundred and fifty million fellow citizens.

ON

DWIGHT MORROW

NE afternoon in the summer of 1880, several small boys were playing baseball in an empty lot in Huntington, West Virginia. Someone made a home run, knocking the ball over a fence surrounding the premises of a lonesome old lady, noted for the violence of her prejudice against small boys, their noises, and diversions. It was the boys' last ball. It had followed others in its flight over the same fence. And they had no money to buy more. They held a council and chose one of themselves, one Morrow, as Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary with the particular mission of getting back as many of the lost balls as he could. It was a ticklish job, for the old woman in the case had a fearsome reputation. But in a few minutes young Morrow returned with all the lost balls and a big red apple - a gift from the awe-inspiring female.

Courtesy of W. T. Dewart, Esq.