that the work shall be performed under the direction of the League of Nations; which contains, if I may so describe it, a spirit of good in a body of evil. There can be no doubt that the history of every important country should be written from a certain international point of view. That is because the history of each country involves to a greater or less degree the history of one or more other countries. The history of America cannot be written without including much of the history of England beginning at least as far back as John Lackland; and it would be absurd to write the history of England without covering for a thousand years much of the history of France. Doubtless there might be much profit in voluntary international conferences or institutes of history; such as one that is soon actually to be held at one of our foremost colleges. But I should gravely doubt if nations would ever accept as authoritative histories of themselves prepared under the direction of an alien body, even an international body. They may appreciate and voluntarily accept histories written by aliens. Lord Charnwood's historical study of Lincoln is probably the best in existence; so is Motley's history of the Netherlands. But that is a very different matter from having histories written to order for us, and by the order not of ourselves but of an alien super-state. Note the practical impossibility of interesting the nations generally in a "universal language". Convenient as such a medium would certainly be, there is not a thought of any nation's adopting one to the abandonment of its own. Note, too, the slow progress of even so eminently practical and desirable a thing as the universal adoption of uniform weights and measures in the metric system. A nation's language is scarcely a more intimate and vital part of its intellectual furniture than its conceptions of history; and while it may and should form those conceptions from a point of view comprising and appreciating other nations, it is likely to insist that that point shall be of its own selection and on its own ground.

It has often been complained that old-fashioned histories were too much written from a military or a dynastic point of view, concerning themselves chiefly with sovereigns and their wars. We have since had histories of peoples, histories of governments,

histories of civilization, histories of intellectual development, histories with an economic interpretation, histories religious, histories industrial, histories sociological, and what not. With due humility, I should like to venture the suggestion that it might not be unprofitable to write some histories from the historical point of view.

The horrors of Herrin and Mer Rouge find hideous sequels in the peonage and chain-gang systems of some States. Florida has recently been much in the spotlight with such deviltries, though it is probably no worse than others. A sheriff is reported to have admitted receiving a bonus from a lumber company for every "convict" that he delivered to it for slavery; though he most virtuously denied that he and the county judge were in a conspiracy to fill contracts for slave labour by getting men drunk, condemning them as disorderly characters, and rushing them to the lumber camps before they had time to get sober. It seems indisputable that members of these convict gangs have actually been flogged to death, as brutally as in the crimes imputed in realistic romance to Simon Legree. The whole business is a damned spot that will not out from American civilization through the mere conviction of a sheriff or a judge here and there, but can be effaced only by abolition of the penal system under which these infamies occur. Lincoln truly said that no man in the world was good enough to own another. It is scarcely less true that no man is safely to be entrusted with such arbitrary and unsupervised control over others as the heads of contract convict camps possess over the hapless wretches who are delivered to them as slaves. It must be that public sentiment in the States where these things occur is revolted against them no less than in the rest of the Union. But there is little virtue in revolt unless it makes itself effective.

Wholly admirable is the act of Mrs. H. P. Davison in founding a number of scholarships for the education of young men from the great English universities at three of the foremost American seats of higher learning; its merit not being lessened by the fact that she is thus executing a design which had been cherished by her

husband before his internationally useful career was closed by death. Affection and honor could wish no better memorial of him. Nor is there any detraction in the circumstance that it is measurably a counterpart of the act of Cecil Rhodes, many years ago; but rather the not too common merit of appreciating a great work and emulating it. What are called exchange professorships have been familiar to us for years, and they have doubtless been useful in promoting better international understanding; though there is fear that in some cases they have been prostituted to the base uses of mischievous propaganda. Far more surely useful, and far more free from suspicion or danger of misuse, are these exchange scholarships. I am inclined to believe that a single American student, spending several years at Oxford or Cambridge, or a single English student spending such time at Harvard, Yale or Princeton, will receive an appreciative impress of the country he thus visits deeper and more valuable for subsequent influence toward international understanding and amity, than the collective impresses received by a thousand students who stay in their own country and listen to the lectures of a visiting professor from abroad.

NEW BOOKS REVIEWED

LIFE OF CHRIST. By Giovanni Papini. Translated by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.

Extreme simplicity, a superfluity of exposition, overstrained rhetoric, a species of denunciation marked by the excesses of a kind of childish passion that can hardly pass current as "unworldliness", violent figures of speech (the Deluge is called "a baptism of annihilation"), passages of exalted or overexalted poetry filled with real yearning; now and then an affirmation strikingly clear, candid, and courageous-these are traits that mark Papini's Life of Christ as perhaps the most remarkable literary phenomenon of recent years, and as the book, of all recent books, the most difficult to estimate.

What shall one say of a writer who thus alternates flamboyance with naïveté, rhetoric with intuition, fustian with faith? Papini writes:

Who will refuse to be like God? Dii estis. Divinity is in us; animality hampers and constricts it, stunting our growth. Who would not wish to be God? Oh, men, are you in very truth content to be only men? Men as you are today, half men, half beasts? Centaurs without robustness, sirens without sweetness, demons with fauns' muzzles and goats' feet? Are you so satisfied with your bastard and imperfect humanity, with your animality scarcely held in leash, taking no step to win holiness save to desire it?

He is on the platform (scarcely in the pulpit) and he will rant in this manner sometimes for several pages at a time. His book is really a sermon addressed to the Age as he conceives it. But what a comment it is upon our modern civilization if men are stirred by this sort of thing, though unmoved by the simple admonition, "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect"! In passage after passage, Papini, with a sincerity almost smothered in rhetoric, a poetry almost choked with words, pours out vehement special pleading in the best of all possible causes. It seems as if he imagined himself addressing humanity as a jury on behalf of Christianity, and were striving to outdo the eloquence of the Devil's Advocate in that personage's best style.

But a few pages further on he forgets his rôle of advocate and writes with a full heart and with a perfect mental sobriety consonant with his subject:

Jesus proposes His experiment, the only remaining possibility, the experiment of love, that experiment which no one has made, which few have attempted (and that for only a few moments of their lives), the most arduous, the most contrary to our instincts, but the only one which can give what it promises.

This is accurate and just-a fundamental truth bravely uttered. It is felt as a home thrust, a shot aimed at the essential weakness of human nature and striking between wind and water.

But is it intuition also which speaks in the following passage?

Among the unclean things which men have manufactured to defile the earth and defile themselves, money is perhaps the most unclean. These counters of coined metal which pass and repass every day among hands still soiled with sweat or blood, worn by the rapacious fingers of thieves, of merchants, of misers; this round and viscid sputum of the Mint, desired by all, sought for, stolen, envied, loved more than love and often more than life; these ugly pieces of stamped matter, which the assassin gives to the cutthroat, the usurer to the hungry, the enemy to the traitor, the swindler to his partner, the simonist to the barterer in religious offices these foul vehicles of evil which persuade the son to kill his father, the wife to betray her husband, the brother to defraud his brother.

All this is Papini's embroidery of the saying, "Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's." One may pass over with slight remark the fact that in this and similar utterances zeal appears in some degree to outrun logic. One does not quite see, for example, why contact with sweat should in any figurative sense make money vile, any more than one can gather from the context of a previously quoted passage why humanity, however imperfect, should be called "bastard". But does Papini here speak with that moral penetration which he manifests in some other parts of his work and which one would like to find everywhere in it? On the contrary, the passage in question strikes one as an unconvincing digression. One is reminded, moreover, of the curious and striking words with which the introduction to this Life of Christ begins: "For five hundred years those who call themselves free spirits because they prefer prison life to army service have been trying desperately to kill Jesus a second time." [The italics are the reviewer's.] Really it seems as if this writer were at times possessed with a spirit of inconsequent denunciation.

It may be supposed that all these peculiarities of style and of tone may be accounted for by the racial temperament, by the political or social background, or even the religious creed of the author. One does not feel that this suggestion is actually relevant. The whole book, aiming as it does at a universal interest, is extremely individual-a confession, a personal exhortation, a desperate effort to be utterly sincere and at all costs convincing. It is indeed a prodigious effort at self-expression, the work of an artist.

Being so, its function is homiletic rather than exegetical. To approach Papini's work as if it were a critical retelling of the Gospel story, to seek to point out the various ways in which his version differs in emphasis from other versions, would appear to be a waste of time. The general effect of the whole is far more important than any shades of opinion expressed in it-more important, even, than the striking defects of the parts. For the general, the cumulative, effect is undoubtedly very great. No excess of rhetoric or tedious simplicity of explanation can altogether mask the earnestness of this poetic soul newly enamoured of goodness. The vitality of the book is remarkable. Even its violence appears well designed to arrest the attention of those who are spiritually sluggish in this melancholy post-war world. In sum, one cannot read this book to the end without obtaining some new and powerful realizations and without being compelled, despite all prepossessions, to recognize fully certain fundamental meanings in the teachings of Jesus.