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owing to our insufficient personnel. For the same reason our efficiency is crumbling, while theirs remains virtually con

E

stant. We have no new ships projected to balance the prospective increase in the navies of Britain and Japan. Surely

the situation calls for a prompt remedy. None other than a restoration of the 5-5-3 ratio will suffice.

NGLAND, by accepting the naval

ratio proposed by Mr. Hughes a year ago, sacrificed her position as the foremost naval power in the world, in a manner to elicit admiration from all those whose eyes were not so covered with the film of prejudice as to blind them to the greatness of the sacrifice. And it hurt.

Can it be supposed for an instant that it was easy to relinquish that which has been so jealously kept and guarded for boast that centuries-no longer to "Britannia rules the waves"? Japan also made sacrifices. After her experience following the war with China, when she was forced by aliens to give up the fruit of victory, Port Arthur, only to view in bitterness of heart its calm appropriation by rapacious Russia; and in view of the general feeling, whether justified or not, that she was outwitted at Portsmouth, is it to be wondered at that she should be apprehensive as to the results of Conferences? The decision to participate at all was taken with misgiving. Another sacrifice that Japan had to make was in the position of inferiority that she was forced to take before the world. This was translated in material terms, by the 5-5-3 ratio, and she has sworn to preserve this status of inferiority for fifteen

years.

It is all very well to say that Japan's nary was actually in less proportion than that decided upon; nevertheless that proportion would not have obtained for long without a very material increase in the American Navy over that already authorized.'

The relative status in capital ships will now obtain for at least fifteen years.

It is true to say that England is financially unable to pit herself against America in a competition of armament, but this fact does not vitiate the sacrifice.

The essential thing about a sacrifice is that it shall be thought a sacrifice, for "thinking makes it so."

And America has given most of all. She has sacrificed the certainty of sea supremacy should she have desired it.

With a greatness of generosity that becomes her greatness of power, she has flung away three hundred millions and more of construction so as fittingly to And set the example of lofty purpose. this is far beyond what she has called for from others. Added to these are the possibly lesser sacrifices entailed by the operation of the other agreements; sacri

fices that are inseparable from any cooperative action.

As a result of the Conference there will, for the present, be less spending of money in peace for war preparation, but the greatest gain of this meeting cannot be measured in money values.

The supreme service that the Conference has rendered mankind is in the advance made in national understanding, perhaps the greatest achievement in that direction ever accomplished.

This brief and entirely inadequate appreciation of the results of the Conference is necessary in order that what follows may not lead to the belief that the Conference as an influence for good has been underestimated.

If one talks with others about the causes of events, there will always be found a vast disparity in methods of reasoning. Ask who began the war, for instance.

"The Kaiser," says one, "with a cynical disregard for the results of his ambition."

"Prussianism and its insistence on Deutschland über alles," another.

"The money bags of the munition maker hungering for more fatness." "Economics," yet another, and so on without end.

On the opposite side there is the same disagreement.

"The recalcitrance of the Slavs." "The selfishness of England." "The necessity of protecting the Fatherland ringed about with enemies."

Now the strange thing about it is that there is at least a grain of truth in practically all the causes that are set forth.

There were a million and more causes of the war, and the fact that one cause operated does not at all prevent the other causes from having done so.

This is a hard thing for the mind to grasp.

Just because the cause of the war lay in Germany's wish to "assure her place in the sun" does not controvert the fact that it also lay in the desire of Russia to protect Serbia from the bullying of Austria.

Just because America entered the war animated by the highest ideals of right and justice does not disprove the fact that she also entered it because American ships were being sunk.

What are the causes of war?
What drives a nail?

The hammer?

The arm that wields the hammer? The man that builds the house? The thought that planned the house? Causes and effects in this world are not simple, they are infinitely complex.

The causes of war are many and complex.

Selfishness and the hate of selfishness, greed and the hate of greed, the nature of man and the desire to improve that nature all are among the causes of past wars and will be found among the causes of future wars.

The Conference on the Limitation of Armaments has done a mighty service, but to believe that the limitation of armaments or the concluding of the Four Power Treaty or any other accomplishment of the Conference has removed the probability of war is unutterably fatuous, as fatuous as to deny that wars may not sometime cease for

ever.

The results achieved may, indeed probably will, lessen the probability of war, but there is no hope that the likelihood of war does not now exist.

Conflict is of the essence of nature. Man has systematized the process, but he has not yet suppressed the tendency. Let us consider a few of the more probable causes of war.

The habitable parts of the world are being rapidly filled up and those parts already filled are being stuffed to overflowing.

It needs no seer to predict the friction that is bound to accompany the crowding and redistribution of peoples in the near future; that is, when the present unoccupied or sparsely occupied places are comfortably filled. The Conference, being convened principally for other purposes, has only very indirectly touched upon these questions.

Another prolific present cause of friction, and consequently a potential cause of conflict, lies in the artificial obstructions, in the form of tariffs, placed in the way of the free distribution of raw materials and of manufactured products throughout the world. The business man and the workingman are at one in their demand for the levying of these taxes, seeing correctly enough their immediate interest in their exaction and not being able to visualize the eventual benefit that would universally result from their elimination.

The Conference was not concerned with the settlement of these questions save in a very minor and unimportant

way.

In addition to this strong desire to restrict the amount of foreign goods that enters into one's own country there runs along parallel with it an equally strong desire to sell one's own goods in foreign countries, as shown in the struggle for the markets of the world.

In the United States, for example, the loss of foreign markets with the stop

page of certain exports would throw thousands of men out of work, with ensuing disarrangement of the industrial fabric. Suppose that the export of manufactured steel were stopped for three months. We export over three hundred million dollars' worth in that time. Not only would steel plants be shut down but all other industries would be affected, shares of other stocks would go down, there would be much selling on the exchanges, less money to be put into productive enterprise, and so much consequent loss in wages. It is imperative for the preservation of industrial contentment that markets be found.

Now, the American workingman demands, and justly demands, a standard of living that not only must be kept high, but one that must be bettering itself continually. So long as domestic demand increases sufficiently fast there is no great necessity for foreign markets in order to insure an increasing wage, but eventually a population saturation point will be reached, and just as the population must then overflow (or the increase must be stopped), so likewise must the distribution of goods overflow or else the condition of the worker becomes static.

These great forces of economics are only just beginning to be felt in their strength, owing to the comparative past sparseness of the population of the world.

The Conference did not, and probably could not, really help this situation much. The principle of the Open Door in China has been reaffirmed and other agreements have been made, but the struggle for markets in the undeveloped regions will continue.

Of the countless causes that tend to create misunderstanding and conflict, three rather important ones have been mentioned:

The pressure of population.

It means that the likelihood of war in the world is great in the rather near future.

It means that America as the greatest nation of the earth cannot escape the chance of involvement, indeed the certainty of it indirectly and the probability of it directly.

By virtue of possessing the next most powerful navy in the world, and financial and industrial strength far surpassing that of any other nation in the world, America was able to call such a conference as was held with a practical certainty that such a call would be well received, and was able to dominate this conference. We still retain numerical equality with the most powerful nation in capital ships, but have given up the possibility of such numerical superiority as would in itself have insured success in future war, which superiority could have been retained only at great expense. This was done by the expressed will of the American people and under the direction of four of the ablest statesmen in the country. It was well done, and well it is that it was done, but the voluntary reduction of our Navy was evidently made with the understanding that the agreement would be lived up to and that, in view of the dangers that confront us as set forth above, such reduction was the maximum consistent with our National safety.

Are we living up to the terms of this agreement?

The capital ship strength of our Navy was specifically defined, but that is only a part of the Navy, for "Men fight, not ships."

If we are to have a Navy, it must be clearly borne in mind that it exists for one purpose, and but for one, and that is to win war. Anybody can fight, but the best man wins. The Navy of the United States must be able to win in any war that we may become involved in, and,

of our ships manned and at sea much of the time that we can be assured of that degree of efficiency in machinery, gunnery, and communications which is essential to victory.

And the officers and men, how are they to learn to make war while the ships are tied up to a dock or lying at anchor? True, much can be accomplished by study on the part of those in high command, but all the study in the world is useless without actual practice as nearly like that which will be encountered in war as is possible to obtain. Ships newly manned are practically useless for fighting until their crews have lived and worked together for some time. We have many examples of that in history. Vivid in the memory of Americans is the case of brave Lawrence, who went to his death in the Chesapeake. The French fleet blockaded for twenty-two months in Toulon by Nelson, who kept the sea during that whole period, is another. When the French ships went to sea they lost their topmasts in a gale and had to put back into port for repairs, while Nelson's ships, manned by experienced sailors, suffered not at all.

It needs salt spray to make a sailor; it needs target practice to make a gunner; it needs maneuvers to make a tactician; and these can be had only by sending our ships to sea.

The American people are heavily burdened by debt and are sorely taxed to pay it, but they have the right to have the situation put before them clearly before making a final decision.

It has been determined that we need a Navy to use in war.

This Navy is of no use unless it can win.

The only way to insure its winning is to enable it to keep the ships in commission and send them to sea and pay the price.

If after hearing the facts the American people are content to have a moderately good Navy instead of the best Navy, that is their undoubted privilege. When war comes, the Navy, whatever there is of it, will do its level best, but if inadequately trained many a mother's son will meet his death who would have been living but for lack of a fighting chance.

Ο

UR acquaintance, in the United States, with the contemporary literature of Latin America is so restricted that Mr. Stimson's felicitous translation of the "Ariel" of José Enrique Rodó is to be regarded as especially auspicious. For it serves to introduce to an English-speaking audience the work of a writer whose influence has extended wherever Spanish is spoken, a philosopher whose ideas found expression in unusual beauty.

Rodó was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, exactly fifty years ago. His youth was spent in an atmosphere of scholarship, and at twenty-six he was Professor of Literature in the university of his native city. Three years later he deserted academic life to enter politics, and for a considerable time was a member of the national Parliament. The sixteen years from 1901 to 1917 were compact with activities at once various and uniform; from every field touched by his interests Rodó drew nourishment for his philosophy of idealism. His personal life was remarkably of a piece with his central doctrine of perpetual and unremitting self-renovation. "Reformase es vivir" (to recreate one's self is to live) are the opening words of his most notable book; like Emerson, he counseled that we should "live ever in a new day." And he put his theories vigorously to the test. Parliamentary debate, miscellaneous journalism, economic investigation, and the criticism of literature and art he successively turned to account in applying his theory of life to divergent spheres of human interest; could any subject be alien to one whose ideal was the complete man? His intellectual concentration was as intense as its expression was various, for his writings reveal a familiarity with foreign literature that might well be envied by a mind devoted exclusively to scholarship. Rodó insistently advocated the necessity of travel as a means of selfrenovation; ironically, he never left Montevideo until 1917, when he was appointed European correspondent by "Caras y Caretas," a Buenos Aires weekly journal of wide influence. He went to Spain, proceeded almost immediately to Italy, and after a brief illness died at Palermo in May, 1917. years later, with much ceremony, his body was brought back to Montevideo to be buried beneath a magnificent monument erected by the nation.

Three

"Ariel," his earliest and in some ways his most charming book, is an excellent

introduction to those central ideas which he later amplified to their full

1 Ariel. By José Enrique Rodô. Translated, with an Introductory Essay, by F. J. Stimson. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $1.25.

Courtesy of the New York Times

philosophic implications in the "Motivos de Proteo" (Motives of Proteus). Taking the form of the imaginary valedictory of a spiritual teacher to the students who are about to leave him, it is less a statement of a theory of life than an invitation to formulate one. It is an eloquent summons to the humane life as the Greeks defined it, a poetic defense of the claims of Ariel rather than Caliban to determine the ideals of civilization. Life in Greece, he observes, was held to be noble only when it was founded upon "the concert of all human faculties, in the free and chartered liberty of all energies capable of contributing to the power and glory of mankind." Thus it was that Athens "could exalt at once the feeling for the ideal with the real, reason with instinct, the forces of the body with those of the spirit. It chiseled clear the four sides

to the soul." This rational and harmonious development of the multiple forces of personality constituted for Rodó the culture of the humane life.

"The basic principle of your development," he says, ". . . should be to maintain the integrity of your humanity. No one function should ever prevail over that final end. No isolated force can satisfy all reasonable objects of individual existence, as it cannot alone produce the ordered concert of collective existence. And, like deformity or dwarfing to the body, is, to the soul, the result of an exclusive object imposed on individual action and a single manner of culture."

Social evolution, he points out, results in the growing complexity of civilization in a constantly increasing heterogeneity in life. As general culture increases, the field of individual activity tends to be more and more restricted to narrow specialization. But the humane life demands, not the intensive cultivation of a single aptitude, but the balanced exercise of all human capacities; how, then, is the determinism of individual vocation, the tyranny of materialism, to be circumvented? Rodó, like

Emerson, would answer, that to live the life of reason means to share nobly in as many forms of experience as we may: "Shrug not your shoulders before any noble and fecund manifestation of human nature, under the pretext that your own individuality ties you of preference to a different one. Be attentive spectators where you may not be actors." He seems here to foreshadow the theory that Croce, applying to the materials of asthetics, has contributed toward our understanding of art; that the function of the spectator is to recreate the experience of the artist. So Rodó, counseling the enlargement of the inner life, points a way to vicarious experience.

One of Rodó's most notable contributions to the interpretation of ideas is his sense of the epic significance of the doctrine of evolution. Very largely that doctrine has served modern thought by clarifying our sense of the past, and its distinctive emphasis both in philosophy and literature has been upon the lowly origin of life. But for Rodó its implications in the future are far more valuable. If the present is the sum total, the complete consequence of an infinite past, why should not its chief value be what it portends of the future? Thus he counsels that "every one who devotes himself to propagate and preserve in contemporary America a disinterested ideal of the soul-art, science, ethics, religious belief, a political policy of ideals should educate his belief in the persevering preparation for the future." It is to the interest of this future no less than to the satisfaction of the present that the individual shall cultivate his own capacities to the fullest extent possible. The reason for this, only hinted at in "Ariel," is stated at some length in the "Motivos" in that doctrine of perpetual self-renovation which gave to Rodó's philosophy the name of "proteanism." In every human being, he says, there is an inexhaustible reservoir of spiritual capacities, largely unknown. This reservoir enables us, if we fail in one direction, to seek a new orientation, since the frustration of one power is compensated for by the discovery of another. Every one should therefore be the Columbus of his own personality, since reality and the future, as well as the past, lie within us. Life is a perpetual becoming, and so is truth; it is therefore the duty of the individual constantly to subject his ideas and feelings to the test of new knowledge as it is created. In that way alone is it possible to insure control of experience by the spirit.

"Ariel," which is an invitation to this life of the spirit, is likewise a denunciation of the philosophy of utilitarianism. Rodó finds two causes assigned for the dominion exercised by utilitarian ideals: the tremendous discoveries of natural science and the wide diffusion of democratic ideas. To offset the conception of science as serving only through its practical applications, Rodó recalls to

r minds the ideals of pure science; we ld not, he warns us, confuse the

search for truth with the perfection of mechanical conveniences. Nor does he find in the ideals of democracy any inherent materialism. Can democracy, he asks, meet the tests of culture and civilization? The question is complicated by the fact that in the Western Hemisphere the first hundred years of democratic experiment were largely preoccupied with the conquest of physical natüre. Like science, democracy was under the necessity of being practical. But the final test is not one of materialism: "The civilization of a country acquires its grandeur not by its manifestations of material prosperity and predominance, but by the higher order of thinking and feeling thereby made possible." Democracy begins by leveling unjust superiorities, but the spiritual world, as well as the natural, abhors an absolute equilibrium. By proclaiming the universality and equality of human rights democracy will ultimately proclaim the predominance of mere number unless it carefully maintains some conception of legitimate superiorities, such, for example, as moral excellence. In this, as in other matters, Rodó puts his faith in

FICTION

science, joining to the conception of equality of opportunity the doctrine of natural selection in the moral domain. To that consecration of mediocrity which to him appears to be the mostdamaging perversion of democracy he opposes the ideal of a democracy that is "just and noble, impelled only by the knowledge and sense of true superiorities, in which the supremacy of intelligence and virtue, the only limits to the just equality of man, receives its authority and prestige from liberty."

The work of Rodó has very directly influenced thought both throughout South America and in Spain, not only in its expression in literature, but in the theory and practice of education as well. Like Emerson and Whitman in the United States, like Ruskin and Arnold in England, his concern was to reinterpret for his time the final values discerned by the spirit. He enunciated no definition of the truth-for him truth, like life, is in process of becoming

but rather directed his energy to sowing a disinterested desire for knowledge and beauty as the two paths upon which truth may be met.

CAPPY RICKS RETIRES. By Peter B. Kyne. Illustrated. The Cosmopolitan Press, New York. $2.

Cappy Ricks, our friend of former stories, retires, and not once but several times; and the more he retires, the more he comes back, bubbling over with energy, courage, and generosity. The first part of this book is one of the liveliest sea tales of the war ever written. CLAIR DE LUNE. By Anthony Pryde. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. $2.

Mr. Pryde's stories always give the satisfaction of introducing the reader to people who talk and act like intelligent and cultivated persons. He always has a story situation also to which the talk and incidents lead up, so that the interest really does culminate at the climax. The present story certainly is as well written as any of his books, though his two earliest novels were tenser and more vivid.

KINGMAKERS (THE). By Burton E. Stevenson. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. $1.90. One of the best of all the many tales that center about revolutions and plots of restoration in imaginary petty king doms in the east of Europe. Here the plotting itself takes place in Monte Carlo, and the poor king never does get his crown back. We won't say that this story is as charmingly written as Stevenson's "Prince Otto," but it is as good as or better than "The Prisoner of Zenda."

MYSTERIOUS OFFICE (THE). By Jeannette Lee. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $1.75.

A woman detective, who (as in a former book) unearths criminals on the condition that she shall start them in a straight line if possible, here unravels the queer theft of $25,000 in bills from

the top of a desk. Any one of several people might have taken it; three (we believe) confessed to taking it; none of those three did take it.

HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BEGINNINGS. By Illustrated. Henry E. Chambers. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. $4.50. The early history of the Mississippi Valley is told in this well-printed book in a pleasant narrative style that makes easy reading. The settling of this great valley constituted one of the most important phases of America's development, and it deserves the ample and sympathetic treatment here given.

ESSAYS AND CRITICISM NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH. By Owen Wister. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2. Mr. Wister writes with strong feeling and an acute sense of character and human passion about American, French, and English soldiers in the Great War. He segregates individuals and makes them talk and act as real men, not like tin-hatted gods or moral idealists. Incident and talk are selected so as to throw out the reality of the fighting men who certainly should and must henceforth be neighbors.

MISCELLANEOUS EVENING POST (THE). By Allan Nevins. Boni & Liveright, New York. $3.50. Reading the New York "Evening Post" would be an education in itself, if uneducated readers were eager to accept the "Post" as an Alma Mater. But its appeal has always been to the highly educated-to people of scholarly instincts, of fastidious tastes, of high intellectual standards. Despite, however, the limited circulation imposed by its quality, the "Evening Post" has for more