far more suitable the colonial style of the White House for the Chief Magistrate of the United States than some specimen of Gothic architecture which might have been chosen ! The picturesque background is lacking in America, and the less ornate the architecture, the more consonant with the genius of the people and their physical environment.

The only contemporary literature of Europe with which it would be just to compare American is that of England, and in the domain of fiction, at least, there is no reason to think that the United States occupies a very inferior position. American novelists are concentrating their best powers more and more upon the description of unique local influences, and the delineation of what may be termed the primitive differences in American character, still so conspicuous in so many parts of the United States; so that American fiction, taken as a whole, already furnishes an almost complete picture of every side of American life, provincial as well as metropolitan. There was a time, and it is not very remote even yet, when English novelists set the tune and the pace, as it were, for every school of fiction in the United States. That time has passed; there is nothing in the best contemporary fiction of America to suggest imitation of English models. The Southern States, in the course of the last twenty-five years, have been especially productive in imaginative writers, whose works have all the racy flavour of a provincial soil, the nearest after all to nature, and, therefore, the most distinctly pronounced in its characteristics. Page in Virginia, Cable in Louisiana, Murfree in Tennessee, and Harris in Georgia belong essentially to an original school because they have the insight of genius into certain sides of American life and character, that are all the more impressive because lying so entirely outside of every metropolitan or cosmopolitan influence. Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling alone, of English writers now living, are superior to them in freshness of humour and pathos, and in a certain depth and vigour of sympathy that come from familiarity with nature in its simplest and most elemental forms.

Well may the English novelists envy the American that variety of material which the primitiveness of personal types in the United States presents to a degree almost without example in the Old World. What do we see in England to-day? The leading writers of fiction, in only too many instances, are compelled either by an impoverished field or by their jaded imaginations, to turn to living men and women of prominence for characters of striking originality. If in some this would seem to prove great poverty of invention, in others, perhaps, it shows a keen commercial spirit, which uses this means to stimulate the sale of novels which otherwise would have only a partial success. Never before have so many works of fiction been issued in England, but never before, perhaps, has she been so poor

in novelists of the very first rank. The eyes of millions of Englishspeaking people on both sides of the water are strained to catch the first glimpse of an imaginative writer who shall equal those who made the middle of the Victorian era so illustrious; it would appear from present signs that he is just as likely to arise in the United States as in Great Britain.

An ideal type of journalism would be a cross between the English and the American newspaper, a hybrid in the best sense, that would possess the brightness, acuteness, and amplitude of the latter, the reserve, dignity, and reliability of the former. The journalism of the United States, as a whole, reflects not only the energy and shrewdness of the American people, but also their frivolity, lightness, and shallowness; on the other hand, English journalism reflects the slowness and heaviness of the English people, as well as their earnestness, truthfulness, and honesty. The American wishes to be amused rather than to be instructed by his daily newspaper; the Englishman wishes simply to be instructed.

It is characteristic of the two peoples that what may be described as the great Reviews of the United States-reviews devoted to a thorough and elaborate discussion of contemporary questions, after the English manner-can be counted on three fingers of one hand, while in England reviews of that kind are, perhaps, the most numerous and the most popular, in the best sense, of all the forms of periodical literature. Even the highly educated American prefers the magazine, bright, superficial, and beautifully illustrated, because no tax is imposed on his mental powers in grasping its contents; what he wants is something that he can read with great intellectual ease, as he passes in the street-car from his home to his office in the morning, and from his office to his home in the afternoon.

The American newspaper is, from one point of view at least, much more open than the English; there is no influence whatever that will induce the average American journalist to suppress what he considers to be news, however embarrassing the disclosure may be to the Government, mortifying to individuals, or discreditable to the general reputation of the community. The result of his ferreting out every fact of interest, and perfect candour and unshrinking boldness in publishing it, is that foreigners obtain the impression from reading American journals that American life, in all of its branches, social, political, commercial and financial, is the most corrupt in existence; but this is because all that is bad is dragged into light. If the press of Europe to-day were as candid, bold, and thorough as the American press, there would be spread abroad as deep an impression of corruption in some branches of European life-in the social and financial certainly, perhaps in the commercial, though not in the political-as now prevails about American life.

How long would the American press have refrained from exposing

the inefficiency and incompetency which the English themselves admit they have in too many cases shown in the Boer War, had that war been one in which the United States was engaged? Unlike the contest with the Boers, the Spanish-American contest was a triumph from beginning to end, and yet this did not deter a pitiless exposure at the moment of every error of judgment and of every instance of corruption that marked its progress. If the Boer War had been an American enterprise, not a single transaction would have been left in the dark; there would have been no veil to tear away from its events when the conflict was over, because no veil would have been permitted to exist from the beginning; nor would any man have been too high in rank, though Secretary at War or Commanderin-Chief, to be held up to condemnation if in fault.

To the mind of the American journalist, what does not appear in the columns of the English newspapers is often of more interest than what is actually published; to him the news suppressed is really the most significant and valuable news after all. He will not admit for one instant that the supposed military necessity of hiding British errors and points of weakness from foreign Powers is any just reason for the concealment of the proper responsibility for both; and he would insist that the only true way to make a nation strong is to proclaim boldly and openly every deficiency until every deficiency is corrected; but in taking such an extreme position he would, perhaps, simply be showing his ignorance of what the European situation, so different from the American, really demands.

The only arm of military power with which the great body of the people of the United States is familiar is the Militia, and except in the great cities, and in crowded districts in the coal and iron regions, where strikes are constantly occurring, and where, therefore, every form of military force is necessarily greatly respected, the citizen-soldiery is regarded with considerable amusement, not unmixed with contempt, in the popular mind. The Americans of this generation are too unaccustomed to real war at their own doors to look with great seriousness on the raw Militia, summoned from counter and factory to parade the streets, or manœuvre in a baseball field, when some annual holiday rolls around again. The sections of the regular army are so widely scattered over the vast area of the United States that there are millions of people there who have never seen a soldier in the Federal uniform.

How different in Europe, especially on the Continent! The smallest town has a barrack; the most familiar music is the strains of the military band. So common is the presence of soldiery that they soon cease to be noticed even by the American. However opposed to militarism, he is compelled to admit that it serves two excellent purposes, apart from creating a bulwark against foreign invasion. First, the ubiquitous soldiery enforces everywhere in

Europe (except in France, perhaps) a respect for order, property, and life, which is incomparably greater than what is seen in the United States; under the shadow of these forests of bayonets the sense of security is absolute-a very satisfactory condition to the mass of people whose aims are peaceful and harmless. Secondly, it overshadows plutocracy, which has already done so much in the United States to repress and dwarf the individual citizen, because there the power of money is in the end the controlling power.

On the Continent, military armament is the necessity of the situation rather than a natural outgrowth of national character; Germany in the western hemisphere, or seated on the British Islands, would be just as free in its institutions as England or the United States; England and the United States, placed on the European Continent, would be just as military in spirit and policy as Germany. France masquerades as a Republic, but a successful war to-morrow would throw it into the arms of a dictator and a new dynasty. The safety of the Continental Powers lies not only in their armies, but also in the quickness with which they can strike, and no nation can strike so quickly as the one which has the reins of government in a single hand. While the democracy of England or the United States were laboriously preparing for a war, Germany would have concluded it. Her thunderbolt is always ready, and at the first tap of the tocsin it falls.

PHILIP ALEXANDER BRUCE.

MONARCHY

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE death of Queen Victoria has naturally suggested some consideration of the part which Royalty has played in the politics of the world during the last sixty years. At the time of the late Queen's accession, the institution was a good deal discredited on the Continent of Europe, and even in England. The great reaction, which followed the revolutionary wave at the close of the previous century, had spent itself, and a distinctly Republican feeling was noticeable in most Western countries. Royalty had done little to vindicate its métier after the fall of Napoleon. The Bourbon Restoration in France had been a conspicuous failure, and had ended, ignominiously enough, in the Revolution of 1830. The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, which followed, had failed to make the royal office popular at home or respected abroad. The King himself, though a man in many ways of great intellectual ability and considerable knowledge both of the world and of books, was a self-opinionated pedant, who believed that human nature could be deceived to an unlimited extent by forms and words. The system under which he ruled France was a despotism of the middle classes, which had not even the merit of being honest. The eighteen years of Louis Philippe's reign had the effect of finally alienating the French people from monarchical institutions. Under this shabbily corrupt régime, feeling was steadily ripening for the outburst of 1848, which led the way in France to another trial of Cæsarism, and finally to what seems likely to be permanent Republicanism.

In the other States of the Continent, the thrones were not as a rule in good odour, and were making no effort to adjust their footing to the rising flood of Democracy. In Austria, the old Emperor Francis the First, who had lived right through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, a veritable legacy from the eighteenth century, had been succeeded, in 1835, by the well-intentioned and thoroughly incapable Ferdinand, who surrendered himself blindly to the spiritual despotism of the Ultramontane clergy and to the stubborn policy of sitting on the safety-valve in temporal matters which Metternich industriously