The armies of Britain, industrial and military, are the next problem which troubles the pessimist. Their inefficiency arises from the same cause-neither has had foes worthy of its steel in recent times, the industrial never till now. Both employer and employed retain much of the easy-going indifference generated by the past monopoly of production. The military army has not faced civilised white foes for more than a generation. It has won glorious victories very easily by shooting down thousands armed with spears, producing in the victors the dangerous impression that 25,000 British troops could march anywhere and do anything. Upon trial methods and equipment were found behind the times like those of the industrial army. Both have been playing at work. The writer (the Hon. George Brodrick) of A Nation of Amateurs in this Review for October 1900 hits the nail on the head. It is as if Arthur Balfour and Herbert Gladstone challenged Vardon and Taylor, and fondly imagined they could score.

But that is not the end of the matter. The qualities of the race lie dormant, and are still there: the dogged endurance, the ambition to excel, the will to do or die, are all there, but it has not been necessary to drill them into disciplined action. Let serious disaster come in industry or war; let British trade really be captured by others, and decline to the point of closing mills and bringing home to employer and employed that it is change or ruin; or let the sceptred isle be invaded and the hitherto self-satisfied amateur officer see in his army life not a fashionable pastime, but a serious profession like that of the navy, and the soldier that he has rifles instead of spears to face, and it is do or die for the salvation of his country, and the world will then see-but perhaps not till then-what wonders the race can still perform when it fights, not for shadowy paramountcy over others, but for home and country.

The blood has not deteriorated. We see how the British workman develops when, in competition with the American, in the mills of the Republic he takes his coat off.

Thus the industrial situation, sombre as it is, and dangerous as it might readily become, is not the chief source of danger to Britain to-day, because, after an awakening more or less rude, and in all respects salutary, it can well be left to work out its own salvation by adopting the changes required both by employer and workman, and which are quite within their power, to enable the country to maintain its trade in competition with others. It is the financial and political situation which is alarming, for it needs no prophet to foretell that a continuance of the aggressive temper which alienates other Governments and peoples, and which has mistaken territorial acquisition for genuine empire-making, must soon strain the nation's power and lay upon its productive capacity such burdens as will render it incapable of retaining the present volume of trade, which is essential to the

preservation of Britain's position as foremost in the world, financially, commercially, and industrially (American Union, hors concours).

If ever a nation had clear and unmistakable warnings, as the writer thinks, that the time has arrived when it should henceforth measure its responsibilities and ambitions throughout the world with its resources, and cut its garment according to its cloth, it is the dear old Motherland of the race, with its trade stationary, an army of thirty thousand men or more to be provided for in South Africa, even after peace comes, its expenditures and taxation increasing, and its promises to pay already at such a discount as to attract capital from across the Atlantic. Rocks ahead, sure enough; but this does not mean that the officers of the ship of State are to drive it full steam upon them. On the contrary, it should mean that the rocks, being now in sight, will be avoided.

The prime quality of the race-its 'saving common-sense,' inherent in men of all parties-may be trusted to see that the good ship Britannia so steers her course hereafter as to ensure her safety and to keep her strong for the many long and prosperous voyages she is destined yet to sail, not only for her own advantage, or that of the English-speaking race, but, as the writer has never ceased to believe, for the advantage of the world as a whole.

ANDREW CARNEGIE.

IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA

If you would fully grasp all that the geographical conditions of the American continent imply, you should cross the Atlantic in its winter gales, and travel far to the west with the thermometer sinking down towards zero. No imagination can bring home to you this vast isolation and this boundless expanse, until, for some eight days, you have watched your great ship as it ploughs across these inexhaustible waters at the rate of a South-Eastern Railway train, seeing nothing but waves, clouds and sky, so that the lonely monotony of this enormous ocean seems to try the nerves at last. And then, wher the express train thunders on, day and night, across the Allegheny mountains to the west, a journey that would suffice to cross Europe just brings you over but a fraction of the space that divides the Atlantic from the Pacific.

Make this voyage and try to conceive what it must mean to the ordinary emigrant rather than to the luxurious tourist, and you will begin to understand how far outside of Europe is this American continent; how completely it offers a new life, a fresh start, a world detached, on a virgin soil unencumbered with our antique civilisation and its burdens. Again, make this westward journey by rail, and watch how the emigrant has to make it, and you feel an awakening sense of the boundless area, the inexhaustible resources, the infinite varieties of the transatlantic hemisphere, which for practical purposes has only just begun to take its place in these latter days in the secular life of humanity as a whole.

America is detached from Europe by a gulf which, however trivial it seems to the summer tourist in his luxurious stateroom and saloon, has been a veritable 'middle passage' to millions and millions of American citizens and their parents-a gulf which the Upper Ten thousand' cross backwards and forwards as we go to Paris or Rome, but which seventy millions of American citizens never cross or recross. To them our Europe is a far-away world, of which but faint echoes reach them, which they will never see more, which can never directly touch their lives; whilst the vast expanses and inexhaustibleresources of their own continent are brought home to them, day by day, in a thousand practical and visible ways.

And yet the paradox strikes my mind that American life, such as a passing visitor finds it in the great cities, is essentially the same as our own; that, in spite of the geographical isolation and the physical conditions, the citizen of the United States is at heart much the same man as the subject of King Edward; that life is the same, mutatis mutandis; that the intellectual, social, and religious tone is nearly identical; that the proverbial differences we hear of have been absurdly exaggerated. Put aside trivial peculiarities of language, manners, habit or climate, admit a certain air of Paris in New York, and a certain European tone in Washington-and these only concern small sections in both cities-for my part I noticed no radical difference between Americans and Englishmen. Physically, they are the same race, with the same strength, energy, and beauty; except for superficial things, they live the same lives, have the same interests, aims and standards of opinion; and in literature, science, art and philosophy, the Atlantic is less of a barrier between our two peoples than is St. George's Channel or the Tweed in the British Isles. The citizen of the United States seems to me very much what the citizen of the United Kingdom is-only rather more so. The differences are really on the surface, or in mere form.

I do not forget all that we are told about the vast proportion of non-American people in the United States, that New York and Chicago contain more Germans than any city but Berlin, more Irishmen than Dublin, more Italians than Venice, more Scandinavians than Stockholm, and' (they sometimes add) 'more sinners than any place but H -ll.' Statistics give us the facts, and of course there is no sort of doubt about the immense degree in which the States are peopled by a race of foreign birth or origin. In the eastern slums of New York, in the yards and docks of the great cities, one sees them by myriads: Germans, Irish, Italians, Swedes, Russians, Orientals, and negroes. But those who direct the State, who administer the cities, control the legislatures: the financiers, merchants, professors, journalists, men of letters--those whom I met in societyare nearly all of American birth, and all of marked American type. I rarely heard a foreign accent or saw a foreign countenance. The American world is practically 'run' by genuine Americans. Foreigners are more en évidence in London or Manchester, it seemed to me, than they are in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston.

My own impression is (of course, I can pretend to nothing but an impression at a first glance) that in spite of the vast proportion of immigrant population, the language, character, habits of native Americans rapidly absorb and incorporate all foreign elements. In the second or third generation all exotic differences are merged. In one sense the United States seemed to me more homogeneous than the United Kingdom. There is no State, city, or large area which has a distinct race of its own, as Ireland, Wales, and Scotland have, and

of course there is nothing analogous to the diverse nationalities of the British Empire. From Long Island to San Francisco, from Florida Bay to Vancouver's Island, there is one dominant race and civilisation, one language, one type of law, one sense of nationality. That race, that nationality, is American to the core. And the consciousness of its vast expansion and collective force fills the mind of American citizens, as nothing can do to this degree in the nations of western Europe.

Vast expansion, collective force, inexhaustible energy-these are the impressions forced on the visitor, beyond all that he could have conceived or had expected to find. It is borne in on him that he has come, not so much to another nation as to a new continent, inhabited by a people soon to be more numerous than any two of the greater nations of western Europe, having within their own limits every climate and product between the Tropics and the Pole, with natural resources superior to those of all Europe put together, and an almost boundless field for development in the future. Europeans, being in touch with the eastern seaboard, do not easily grasp the idea how fast the population, wealth, and energy of the United States are ever sweeping to the west. It is an amusing 'catch' when one is told that the central point of population of the United States is now at Indianapolis, nearly a thousand miles west of Boston; that the geographical centre of the United States since the acquisition of Alaska is now west of San Francisco. It is long since an Eastern State man has been elected President, and we are told that there will never be another. The political centre of gravity is now said to lie in the Mississippi Valley. And the destined metropolis of the United States will soon be Chicago or St. Louis. Chicago, with its unlimited area for expansion north, west, and south, and its marvellous site on the vast inland seas, may prove to be, in a generation, the largest, richest, and most powerful city in the world.

Chicago, to which I was invited to give the annual address in commemoration of George Washington, was the first city in the United States in which I sojourned; and it naturally interested me much. It did so, amongst other things, because I am older than the city itself. At my own birth, I learn, it was a village in a swamp with 100 inhabitants, and I heard of a man now living who has killed bear on the site of the Central Lake Park. Although it is said to extend over a space of some thirty miles, it has vast edifices of twenty stories, and its banks, offices, public buildings and halls show a lavish profusion of marbles, granite, and carved stone. It is not a beautiful city, though it has great natural opportunities on its level lake shore; and perhaps, as whole streets have been bodily raised upwards by machinery many feet, it is conceivable that it may be made a fine city in time.