roaring of lions by no means hinders the dialogues of insects and rodents; this network of lower voices gives the jungle its deep life. The slender tones of talking ships fill the atmosphere of the sea with a mysterious animation. A big liner, come from tropical seas, announces her passage of such and such a frequented cape. A torpedo-boat patrolling toward Gibraltar tells Port Said about the ships which it has sighted. This torpedo-boat has not got strong enough lungs to shout to the other end of the Mediterranean; it calls Bizerta or Toulon, who answers, takes its message, and relays it forward, like a rebounding ball, to the antennae of Malta, to the masts of a French cruiser in the Ionian Sea, to the wires of a Russian ship in the Aegean, and finally it reaches Port Said. A mailboat announces its position, a squadron asks for orders, a naval attaché or an ambassador sends out information gained by spies; the Resident General of Morocco is sending wheat to Montenegro; the main guards give warning that a submarine is in sight; colliers ask to be told exactly where they are to meet certain cruisers; the whole Mediterranean taps the antennae of the Commander in Chief as a swarm of subalterns tap at the door of military headquarters.

No disorder, no discord in these gusts of whisperings. Like the musicians in a well-drilled orchestra, all these talkers speak at the minute, at the second previously fixed for their turn; chronometer in hand, the telegraph operators watch for the instant allotted to them, and immediately send forth trills of short, brief notes; whether they have finished or not at the end of their period,

they stop and wait, for immediately a distant voice begins its part, and would protest violently if any one prevented its speaking. The whole extent of the Mediterranean is divided into sectors, the time is cut up into fragments, and no one is allowed to break the silence if the pre-established table bids him keep still.

Besides, the guilty parties are quickly found out. Just as the fingers of a blind man acquire surprising sensitiveness, so the operators' ears distinguish the timbre, the tone, the musical value of the chatterers whom they have never seen. For the initiated the electric radiations have a personality like human speech. Two posts, two ships have distinct voices, voices, pronunciations. This one talks with a sputter, the other speaks with solemn slowness; the voice of one suggests a match scratched on sandpaper, another buzzes like a fly, another sings small, like the flight of mosquitos. It is a concert almost magical. In his padded cabin the operator hears and distinguishes the whirr of the cricket, the squeak of the violin, the rasped wing-cover of the beetle, the hiss of frying, which the fantastic electricity is sending forth, hundreds of leagues away. It flickers, ceases, begins again; you would say a goblin symphony in some wide wilderness, and yet the least of these vibrations is a message of war, of life and of death.

And indeed they are careful not to talk without saying anything. They all use only secret languages. This perpetual chatter contains no word, no phrase which any one can understand unless he possesses the key on which rests the safety of ships. Cipher, cipher, cipher, nothing else circulates in space.

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NE of the thorniest problems of the war in France is the rent question, and in the last two months it has become so acute that the Chamber of Deputies has devoted many hours of serious debate to its solution. Tenants have paid no rent since the beginning of the war, and as the months have accumulated into years the situation has become impossible. The magnitude of the question may be gauged by the fact that the rents unpaid in Paris alone since the war amount to $400,000,000.

When complete mobilization was ordered, causing a profound disturbance in the commercial, industrial, and social life of the nation, the Government issued, among other moratoria, one applying to house rents. It was intended primarily for the relief of small rent payers, especially those whose breadwinners had been called to the front. Its scope, however, proved to be much wider, and although landlords were authorized to take legal proceedings for the recovery of rent where they could prove the ability of the tenants to pay, they found in actual practice that they were helpless in any serious attempt to enforce their rights.

So long as the war seemed likely to end in three months the moratorium caused no great hardship, but as it has been prolonged from quarter to quarter the situation has grown so acute that an early solution is essential. All France was settling down to the comfortable practice of not paying rent. A good many people who were quite able to pay had taken advantage of the moratorium. Gradually there had grown up a popular conviction that at the end of the war the Government would pass some sort of law excusing tenants from the payment of at least a portion of the total rent bills. It was a dangerous belief.

First of all, M. Briand, the Premier, shattered the fond hopes of those who could, but would not, pay, by declaring publicly that all tenants in a position to do so must be made to fulfill their liabili

ties. Then, for the January quarter, the moratorium was timidly modified so as to compel Government and other public officials, as well as the Bank of France employes drawing regular salaries, to pay their rent.

The question is complicated by the number of different categories of tenants and landlords, and by the hopelessness of expecting the small ratepayers to be able ever to settle the arrears which the law has allowed them to accumulate. It is obvious that a soldier who has fought for his country for eighteen months or two years, during which time he and his family have deen deprived of their ordinary resources and obliged to subsist on the modest separation allowance granted by the State, cannot decently be asked to pay two years' back rent, even in installments. It is highly probable, moreover, that if such men were worried by landlords there would be serious trouble in the country.

But who is going to bear the loss? It is calculated that there are more than 700,000 families in the Department of the Seine alone (Paris and environs) whose rent is under $120 a year. This, naturally, is the principal category of tenants concerned in the proposed legislation. The Government says: "We will bear a portion of the debt if the departments and the landlords will bear their share." In other words, the landlords (of property, flats, &c., the tenants of which pay less than $120) must not expect to get the total amount of arrears due to them, but would be paid a substantial part by the State.

This arrangement seems to satisfy no one. The landlords clamor for payment in full. Their argument is that, as the State made the law which caused the loss, the State must be held responsible, and ought to indemnify completely the landlords. The tenants, vigorously supported by the Socialist Party, are opposed to all idea of the State reimbursing the landlords because, they claim, the money would have to come from the taxpayers'

pockets, and thus the burden would still be borne by the tenants. Why should the fact of a man putting his money into property confer special privileges on him? No, say the Socialists, those who can pay must pay; and let the corporation of landlords make good among themselves the losses sustained by their poorer colleagues whose tenants happen to be unable to pay their rent.

The Government proposes to deal with the problem by authorizing the canceling of leases in cases of the tenant being killed or sustaining permanent injury,

while the question of according rebates, exonerations, or time for the settlement of arrears would be left till after the war for decision by the proper tribunals. Tenants called to the colors, widows and heirs of victims of the war would be entitled to a reduction of the amount of rent due. Others to benefit by the measure would be small tenants killed or incapacitated by the war, tenants paying less than $200 in the Department of the Seine, or $120 in towns of more than 100,000 inhabitants, or $60 in towns of more than 5,000 inhabitants.

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NE of the most widely circulated prints in Germany during the last year is the work of the well-known painter, C. A. Brendel. "Stilles Heldentum,” (“Quiet Heroism,") as it is called, depicts a strong and vigorous woman taking up the plow where it was left by the man gone to battle. That picture is a symbol of the change which has taken place in German life; the women of the empire are today supplanting the men in the country and in town, in factory and shop, while the men are offering their lives in defense of home and hearth. In farming, of course, women began to take the place of men from the early days of the war, but in all other fields of economic life the change from male to female workers did not take place nearly so soon, nor so completely. On the contrary, in the first months of the war, female workers in manual as well as intellectual avocations were particularly hard hit by the lack of employment.

Even when, with the recovery of economic activity and the increased enlistment, unemployment as far as the males were concerned was greatly reduced, the female labor market was still slow to improve. Only during the last half year have women actually taken the place of men in a great variety of lines of activity.

In agriculture the adaptation to war conditions came easily, because in times of peace German agriculture rested to a very large extent on the shoulders of the women. The census of 1907 showed that in Germany 4,500,000 farm hands, almost one-half of the total, were women. Cattle raising, the cultivation of potatoes, cabbage, turnips, sugar beets and other vegetables requiring hoe work, have for a long time been almost exclusively in the hands of women.

How important the existence of so large a number of female workers ac

customed to arduous farm work was to be for Germany few people had imagined before the war. This importance, however, was manifested in the very first days of the war, when the strongest and most capable men were taken from their harvest tasks. If the first war harvest was gathered to the last grain, if nothing of this precious possession was lost, Germany owes this to the active work of her women. And then when the time came to till the ground again, when it was necessary to get as much from the soil as it would yield, then it was again the women who doubled and tripled their energies in order to replace the missing At present the women, old men, and children have practically a monopoly of agricultural pursuits.

men.

The change from male to female labor did not take place so quickly and in such a matter-of-fact way in any of the other branches of economic life. It was not until January, 1915, that a steady increase became noticeable in female industrial labor. In the beginning the men withdrawn from the labor market could be replaced by men; there was even a lack of employment until the economic life adjusted itself. But soon the demand for labor was greatly increased and the women were called upon. In the course of the first six months of the year 1915 the number of female industrial workers grew by about half a million. Yet the supply of workers in the female labor market has by no means been exhausted. Here Germany possessed a source that will not be exhausted for a long time to

come.

Female labor has increased, especially in those industries which may be designated as war industries, viz., in the metal and machine industry, in electrical and in chemical industry. That the women have proved their usefulness and ability is shown by the fact that in 1915 a large ammunition factory alone employed

50,000 women, and that the manufacture of shells is today almost exclusively in the hands of women. With the exception of the finer work, which requires extreme precision, and which is attended to by skilled male workers, there is no part of the work not done by women; the making of the core of the shell, the cleaning of the cast shells, work at the lathe, at the boring and cutting machines, the filling of shells, the making of shell baskets-all is the work of women.

In addition to ammunition, almost all war supplies pass through women's hands. For example, the horseshoe industry is largely carried on by women. In the rifle factories women manufacture certain parts. Drinking cups, kitchen utensils, and bottles for use in the field are made by their busy hands. Many lines of business working normally with a preponderantly female staff-such as the textile industry, tailoring, and dressmaking-to a great extent have been converted into cog-wheels of the great war machinery, and are, where the demand for their normal products has fallen off, bending their energies to supply the army with articles akin to those which they manufacture in peace time. Here the changes are not very marked either in the employment or in the nature of the work of women.

It is noteworthy that even in the beginning of the war, when all industrial branches still showed a decrease of female labor, the metal industry, the machine industry, and the foodstuff industry experienced an increase. After a quarter of a year the mining and textile industries were added to this list, while in the electrical and chemical industry the same phenomenon could be observed only during 1915. These are, of course, all more or less directly related to the war, and the increased demand is not exclusively due to a decrease in the male workers, but also to an intensified activity of these branches in supplying the evergrowing needs of the armies.

The heavy iron industry was one of the first that was forced to engage female labor and is still their biggest employer. This is not only the case in the lighter work, but in work that would

never have been assigned to women under normal conditions. The law which was issued at the beginning of the war, relaxing the restrictions in the occupation of female workers, came to the aid of this industry. The Upper Silesian foundries have made extensive use of this legislative alleviation. In many cases in these foundries women only do the work hitherto performed by juvenile male workers, who have passed on to take care of the heavy work of the men; but in others the heavy work is also done by women. One smelting concern reports the employment of fifty women in the smelting works, of twenty-five in the coke works, and of sixty in the steel and rolling plants. Another concern even reports one woman engaged as a stoker at the big engine furnaces. All this work is, of course, normally done by men, and is really so heavy as to be injurious to women if done for any great length of time.

Next in the proportional increase of female workers come the electrical, chemical, textile, and foodstuffs industries in which, though in most cases entirely new, the tasks the women have to perform are much lighter.

The

The manufacture of gas meters cannot be considered as actual war work. scarcity of petroleum brought about the increased utilization of illuminating gas. That resulted in a greater demand for gas meters, for the manufacture of which there were no longer enough male workers, so women are now used in the manufacture of meters. They only make some of the parts, however; the more complicated work is still done by experienced tinsmiths.

In the wire factories female workers are now occupied in winding the wire, at the plaiting machines, and at the wiredrawing bench. In the manufacture of cast iron kitchenware women work at the molding machines. In machine factories they do the painting work and are used for transportation, formerly the work of men exclusively. They are also employed in tinning spoons and other eating utensils, in making parts of umbrellas, &c.

Outside of the large and organized fac