the real causes of Russia's military weakness, so that they might be removed before the breaking out of another war, General Kuropatkin immediately began the preparation of a detailed history of the Manchurian campaign; and in a little more than a year, with the assistance of his staff officers, he completed a work which made four large volumes and comprised about 600,000 words. To the first three volumes, which were largely technical in character, the Czar and his Ministers made no objection, but when the author submitted to them the manuscript of the fourth volume, which covered the foreign policy of the Government, the causes of the war, and the reasons for Russia's defeat, they promptly condemned the whole work as "injudicious" and "inopportune," and ordered the immediate suppression of the three volumes that had been printed as well as of the volume that existed only in manuscript. By this action the author was virtually gagged, while his critics and enemies were allowed to assail and denounce him without censorial check or restriction.

Such a state of affairs, however, could not last long, because General Kuropatkin still had many devoted friends, and some of them determined to have the suppressed work published abroad. In order to do this without throwing any of the responsibility for it upon the author, they are said to have committed a friendly burglary by entering the General's house at night and carrying the condemned history away. This may or may not be true, but certain it is that the friendly conspirators secured the manuscript of the fourth volume in some way and sent it to London. Onehalf of it went out of Russia under the skirt of a lady's dress, while the other half was exported by a means of conveyance which combined concealment with security, but which it is not expedient to describe. When it reached its destination, the persons to whom it was consigned immediately took out a policy upon it at Lloyd's, insuring it, for a large sum, against fire, burglary, theft, and Russian accidents" of all kinds. Such, in brief, is the story of the manuscript which has now been given to the American public under the title "The Russian Army and the Japanese War."

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One need hardly do more than glance through the work in order to find obvious and abundant reasons for the attempt of the Czar and his Ministers to suppress it. Take, for example, the account given in Chapter VI of the events that led up to the war. No one, I think, can read the narrative and the accompanying documents without becoming convinced that the rupture with Japan was attributable to the Czar, the Grand Dukes, and a few highplaced courtiers in St. Petersburg, who had invested several million rubles in schemes for the exploitation of Manchuria and Korea; who feared that they might lose their money if Russia kept her promise to withdraw from Chinese and Korean territory, and who foolishly believed that Japan, at the last moment, would recede from her diplomatic position rather than fight. General Kuropatkin proves conclusively, by quotations from his letters and reports, that he strongly opposed an aggressive policy in the Far East, and even urged the Czar to give up Port Arthur and Dalny, withdraw his troops from Chinese and Korean territory, and abandon the Manchurian adventure" altogether. But the Czar would not do this, and when the "adventure" ended in a great national disaster, he was not willing to have it shown that he had supported the speculative schemes of the promoter Bezobrazoff, and had disregarded the advice and warnings of such sane and far-sighted Ministers as Kuropatkin and Lamsdorff.

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One of the interesting parts of General Kuropatkin's book, in this era of peace societies and constantly increasing armaments, is the chapter devoted to Russia's military problems, past and future, and to the wars in which she has been engaged since the beginning of the eighteenth century. The rulers and Prime Ministers of the great European Powers-Russia, Germany, Great Britain, Austria, and France-declare that their gigantic military establishments have not been created and are not maintained with a view to offensive action against other nations, but are intended solely for purposes of self. defense. What, however, has been the proportion of defensive wars to aggressive wars in the history of Russia? From officially compiled data, General Kuro

patkin shows that in the course of the past two centuries Russia has had peace for seventy-two years and war for one hundred and twenty-eight years. Exclusive of civil conflicts, the suppression of revolts, etc., she has waged twenty-two aggressive wars, lasting in the aggregate one hundred and one years, and only four defensive wars, lasting altogether four and a half years.

In her one hundred and twenty-eight years of war, Kuropatkin says, she put into the field "some 10,000,000 men, of whom about one-third were lost to the nation, nearly 1,000,000 being killed and wounded. In our efforts to reach the Black Sea we lost 750,000 out of 3,200,000 put into the field against Turkey, while the conflict with Sweden cost us 700,000 out of 1,800,000 men employed. This is sufficient to convey some idea of what sacrifices we must expect from our army in any attempt on our part to reach the shores of the Pacific and Indian Oceans during the present century."

General Kuropatkin does not think that Russia should try to acquire India, or to embarrass Great Britain in any part of Asia. Upon this subject he says:

Absolutely convinced as I am that the possession of India would in twenty years' time be a misfortune and an insupportable burden for Russia, I consider it both natural and right that we should establish an entente with Great Britain, so that in case of any great rising in India we should be on the side of the British. The twentieth century must see a great conflict between the Christian and the other nationalities in Asia, and it is essential, for the welfare of humanity, that we should, in such case, be allied with the Christian Power against the pagan

races.

With regard to the danger that Russia has to apprehend from outside foes Kuropatkin says, "If we confine our actions to self-defense, no enemy will be likely to attack us;" but he evidently does not expect that Russia, in the twentieth century, will confine herself to self-defense, because he further says:

In the twentieth century we shall probably have to put into the field about the same number of men that we did in the eighteenth and again in the nineteenth, viz., 4,900,000, and we must be prepared to face a loss in killed and wounded of 2,000,000, because losses become greater as weapons are perfected. In proportion to the number

of men engaged, our losses in the nineteenth century were double those of the eighteenth.

In the twentieth century, moreover, Russia must be prepared to fight on, regardless of losses, until her armies are completely victorious. All her recent wars-the Crimean, the Turkish, and the Japanese-were ended unnecessarily and prematurely, and were therefore more disastrous to the nation than they would have been if they had been fought through to a victorious finish. "Every war," Kuropatkin says, “brings in its train much unhappiness to both sides, but the loss of a campaign is, for a great nation, a supreme misfortune, and one overwhelming the machinery of government. Therefore, strive as it may against commencing hostilities, when once a country takes up arms it should continue to fight until it wins; otherwise it will lose the right to be considered a great nation, and will become a collection of mere ethnographic material' from which other nationalities may be strengthened."

It may be questioned, however, whether a nation strengthens itself by collecting foreign “ethnographic material," as Russia has done in Finland, Poland, and the Caucasus, and as Austria has more recently done in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It appears incidentally in the fifth chapter of Kuropatkin's work that the proposal which the Czar made in August, 1898, to have an International Peace Conference assembled at The Hague, for the purpose of considering the possibility of limiting armaments, was based upon, or at least suggested, by Russia's financial difficulties and her inability at that time to keep up in the international race for military supremacy. Just before Kuropatkin became. Minister of War, in 1898, his predecessor, General Vannofski, made up the financial estimates of the Ministry for the five-year period from 1898 to 1903. They called for 455,000,000 rubles ($227,500,000) to cover extraordinary expenditures, in addition to the immense sums regularly appropriated for the support of the military establishment from year to year. The Minister of Finance declared that he could not possibly provide such a sum as 455,000,000 rubles, but agreed, after a long discussion, to furnish 160,000,000 rubles. "When I became Minister of

War, therefore," Kuropatkin says, "I received an inheritance of difficulties. We had nearly 300,000,000 rubles less than we really needed for important objects, and as a result of this deficiency we fell more and more behind our neighbors in military readiness, and had to suspend many enterprises for the strengthening of our position, both on the western frontier and in Asia. It was my profound conviction that the most im portant thing to be none was to strengthen our western frontier, but in accomplishing this alone we could use up all of the 160,000,000 rubles of extraordinary appropriation, and yet there were many other needs of almost equal urgency. The Czar took the subject into consideration, and his high-minded suggestion for the limitation of armaments had a practical application in the plan adopted."

The greater part of General Kuropatkin's book-one-third of the first volume and nearly all of the second-is devoted to an explanation of the reasons for Russia's defeat in Manchuria, and to suggestions for the improvement of her military service. Her defeat, Kuropatkin thinks, was mainly due to the strength, courage, patriotism, and ability of the Japanese, which were greatly underestimated in Russia; to the inadequacy of the TransSiberian Railway as a means of quickly concentrating the nation's strength in a field so remote as Manchuria; to the discontent and disaffection of the Russian people, who did not understand the objects of the war, and consequently did not approve it nor give it their support; to the activity of the Russian revolutionary party, which alarmed the Central Government and ultimately forced it to end the war prematurely; and, finally, to ignorance, error, jealousy, dissension, incapacity, lack of co-ordination, and many other causes of weakness which became apparent in the War Department, the General Staff, and the army when Russia's military system was "tried out " under the extraordinary strain of a conflict with a first-class power.

General Kuropatkin's description of the flight and disintegration of the Russian army after the battle of Mukden

The italics are mine.-G. K.

makes it reasonably certain that if the Japanese had been able to follow up their victory promptly, or even to assume the offensive again within a fortnight, they would have turned the Russian defeat into an almost irreparable disaster. Kuropatkin's force went to pieces so rapidly that on the 13th of March-three days after the battle-one hundred and fourteen battalions in the Second and Third Armies, which should have had, in the aggregate, a strength of about 100,000 men, could muster only 16,390. At this time, General Kuropatkin says, no map of the neighboring country ex isted, and the little information we had of the enemy was chiefly remarkable for its absolute vagueness. There were no roads to the rear, no local depots for the supply of the army, and no fords over the Sungari River, which was a standing menace, as the usual spring floods were still ahead of us."

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In such a situation, General Kuropatkin could hardly have saved his army if the Japanese had promptly renewed their attack; but Field-Marshal Oyama made no further advance, and in the next six months the Russians brought their strength up to 600,000 men-a force which is said to have exceeded that of the Japanese by at least 100,000. It then became Japan's best policy to make peace if possible.

General Kuropatkin does not hesitate to assume his full share of responsibility for the result of the war. In his report to the Czar on the battle of Mukden he admitted that he was "mainly responsible for the disaster;" and in his farewell address to the First Manchurian Army he said: "Before all others, I, your senior commander, am guilty, because I did not succeed in rectifying our many moral and material defects during the war, and in making the most of the undoubtedly strong points of our troops."

He does not admit, however, that the war ought to have been unsuccessful, nor does he think that it would have been unsuccessful if it had lasted another year; but, he says, " when the first campaign has been disastrous, and when famine, disease, paralysis of trade, and, above all, heavy losses, make themselves felt, a Russian monarch must have a

character of iron to enable him to resist the clamor that is raised in favor of accepting defeat and making peace."

General Kuropatkin's work, as a whole, contains no vivid narration or picturesque. description, and no material that can properly be called sensational. It is careful in statement and dispassionate in tone, and its interest and value consist in its presentation of new facts; its disclosure of Russia's aims and purposes,

particularly in the Far East; its generous estimate and cordial appreciation of the Japanese; and its frank and unsparing revelation of the weaknesses, blunders, and shortcomings of the Russian Government and Russian military administration. In short, it is the view taken by a soldier and statesman of Russia's national and military problems, of her policy in the Far East, and of her defeat in Manchuria.

"The Wrong and Peril of Woman Suffrage," by Dr. James M. Buckley, is journalism in book form. It is not and does not purport to be an exhaustive treatment of the subject, but it contains some facts of which the advocates of woman's suffrage generally keep their audiences in ignorance, probably because they think that “ignorance is bliss and that it is "folly to be wise." They are such as these: The highest court in England has affirmed that woman's suffrage is not a legal right, and "that the exclusion of women from the suffrage was not on account of their intellectual inferiority, but from a desire to promote decorum; in this way it was rather a privilege and a homage paid to the sex;" the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that woman's suffrage is not a Constitutional right in the United States; woman's suffrage has been defeated in Oregon in three popular elections and by increasing majorities; it was defeated in Wyoming; after brief trial it was defeated in the Territory of Washington: it has been defeated in the States of Kansas, California, Oklahoma, and Iowa; it was tried in the early history of New Jersey for thirty-one years, and the result was that "the whole State was so disgusted that an act was passed restricting the suffrage to white male citizens twenty-one years of age:" over against the conviction of some notable women formerly opposed to but now in favor of woman's suffrage may be put the fact that John Bright, Herbert Spencer, Mr. Gladstone, Bishop Vincent, and others, at first advocates of woman's suffrage, became convinced on further study that their advocacy was a mistake, and reversed their opinion; while the oft-quoted approval of woman's suffrage by Mr. Lincoln, parenthetically inserted in a sentence, was made when he was twenty-seven years of age, and nothing he ever said either in public or private would lead to the belief that he held this opinion in later life. Dr. Buckley's articles are courteous and non-polemic in tone;

their spirit is indicated by the dedication: "Dedicated to men and women who look before they leap." (Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. 75c.)

Every one who has ever floated down the Danube from Vienna to Budapest must have for some hours experienced a certain exasperation at finding nothing but lowlying banks on either side and, with the exception of Pressburg, rather uninteresting towns. But on approaching the hills and mountains of Hungary, what a welcome change! Then it is that one says, "The Danube surpasses the Rhine.' To the lover of the Hungarian hills and the lover of perhaps the most beautiful city in EuropeBudapest-the sumptuous volume entitled "Hungary" should come as an appropriate holiday gift. The superbly colored pictures in illustration of the text have been painted by Adrian and Marianne Stokes, and the text itself is the work of Adrian Stokes. To show the author's spontaneous style, lightness of touch, and aptness of description we quote the following: "The great river wound on among hills. Now and again we passed a village or a town-Gönyö, Komárom, Radvány; sometimes a little tower peeped up behind a dyke. In the warm light of afternoon we saw far away before us the colossal dome of the Basilica of Esztergom (Gran), and no building that I know, except St. Peter's at Rome, when seen from afar, gives such an impression of size. Even the mountains behind it looked insignificant and out of scale. Standing as it does high above the river, a palace and a line of houses along the base of the rocks on which it is built, it loses little on nearer approach. Esztergom is the seat of the Prince-Primate of Hungary, lord of many possessions and vast estates. On looking back when we had steamed away, the dome still loomed against the sky immense when other buildings had faded out of sight. We touched at Visegrád,

a mountain where kings of the eleventh century resided, and now ruined walls around its barren peak alone mark the site of what was called an earthly paradise. Villas clustering round its foot looked gay among the trees. The glow of a golden sunset was behind the purple mountains before we left them to pass again through level plains, and, far away before us, low down on the horizon, a faint dun-colored haze told of the presence of a great city. The charm of that approach to Budapest by river late on a summer evening was indescribable. The Danube divided into two arms, which, reuniting, formed a long, low island. Again it divided close to the city, flowing round the beautiful Margaret Island-its noble trees, its pleasure grounds and pavilions. Young men in outriggers skipped silently by, or landed in the gloom of overhanging foliage. The sky, full of gentle gradations, was charged with the last warm light from the afterglow behind us-an all-pervading light which, softly falling, united all things in one great harmony." It would be a pity to part with the pictures, but, for the sake of intending travelers, we hope that the publishers will issue the text in a cheap edition and that the author will add what such a volume should have a chapter on the economics and politics of Hungary. (The Macmillan Company, New York. $6.)

We hope that our readers have found their appetite for more information respecting the George Junior Republic stimulated by articles concerning this venture which have appeared in The Outlook. If so, they will find their interest increased and their curiosity satisfied by Mr. George's book, "The Junior Republic." To take, as Mr. William R. George has done, nearly two hundred boys and girls of the rougher sort from the streets of New York and put upon them the responsibility of enacting and enforcing their own laws argued a singular audacity of faith in the principles of self-government. The success of the enterprise is an extraordinary

phenomenon. Whether it would have succeeded under any man not endowed with the peculiar combination of qualities which Mr. George possesses may be questioned; whether it will succeed in other States, under other leadership, remains to be determined. But if it should remain an absolutely isolated phenomenon, due to the idiosyncratic genius of Mr. George, it would still be a most interesting story, and a most valuable study in sociology. In both aspects we commend it

to our readers. (D. Appleton & Co., New

York. $1.50.)

While Commander Peary is receiving universal praise for his achievement of reaching the North Pole, and the claims of Dr. Cook to have accomplished the same feat are being severely scrutinized and harshly attacked, an important addition to the literature of polar exploration has appeared in the volumes recording the results of the Shackleton expedition in Heart of the Antarctic." Lieutenant

E. H. Shackleton, with a party of twelve, sailed from New Zealand to the south on January 1, 1908. The expedition made its headquarters on Ross Island, under the shadow of the volcanic mountains Erebus and Terror. After a winter of preparation and scientific observation, a party of four, with Lieutenant Shackleton at the head, set out for the South Pole on October 29. The party traveled with four sledges drawn by four Siberian ponies. The ponies perished one by one, three being killed at the end of their usefulness and one falling into a crevasse. On January 9 the party reached latitude 88° 23′, one hundred miles from the Pole, and were compelled by flagging strength and failing provisions to turn back. This Farthest South point was on a flat plateau ten thousand feet in elevation, and all the indications pointed toward the belief that the Pole itself is situated on this lofty plain. Some of the hardships of the return journey may be indicated by snatches from Lieutenant Shackleton's diary:

February 8.-Did 12 miles. We had fine weather after 10A.M. Started from camp in blizzard. Adams and Marshall still dysentery; Wild and I all right. Feel starving for food. Talk of it all day. Anyhow, getting north, thank God. .

February 9.-. . . All thinking and talking of food. February 10.- All thinking and talking of food. February 11.— . . All our thoughts are of food. We ought to reach the depot in two days. Now we are down to half a pannikin of meat and five biscuits a day..

February 13.-. Reached the depot, with all our food finished, at 11.30 A.M. There we got Chinaman's [one of the ponies] liver, which we have had to-night. It tasted splendid. We looked around for any spare bits of meat, and while I was digging in the snow I came across some hard red stuff, Chinaman's blood frozen into a solid core. We dug it up, and found it a welcome addition to our food. It was like beef-tea, when boiled up. . . .

February 15.-My birthday to-day. I was given a present of a cigarette made out of pipe tobacco and some coarse paper we had with us. It was delicious...

safely on March 4, where the ship which had The Southern party reached headquarters

returned from the north was awaiting them. Meanwhile another party had gone to the northwest across Victoria Land and definitely located the South Magnetic Pole, in latitude 72° 25′ and longitude 155° 16′. Lieutenant Shackleton's narrative is written with the utmost simplicity and an entire lack of "fine writing," and loses nothing by the fact. The volumes contain also an account of the Magnetic Pole expedition by its leader, Professor T. W. E. David, and chapters of interesting and valuable scientific observations. They are fully and admirably illustrated. (J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia. $10 per set.)

George Meredith once commented on Henry James's volume of impressions of his native land after a number of years abroad as follows: "James writes about America revisited, but what it really comes to is a tour of Henry James's inside. He tells you how