The second visit of Dickens to America-from November 19, 1867 to April 19, 1868-is more flattering to our sense of breeding and social position. Dickens liked us better. Boston is no longer "a black swamp". Some of our cities are as fine as Leeds and Birmingham. Why, there are handsome women in Baltimore! But we are still "press-ridden". The newspapers are as hard on the great Victorian novelist as they were on thirty-yearold "Boz". If, twenty years before, they had cooed over the young man's glossy, black curls, now they wrote broadsides on the lecturer's waistcoat, brilliant scarf, and heavy gold watchchain. "Sometimes," writes Dickens, "I am described as being 'evidently nervous'; sometimes it is rather taken ill that 'Mr. Dickens is so extraordinarily composed.' My eyes are blue, red, gray, white, green, brown, black, hazel, violet, and rainbowcolored. I am like 'a well-to-do American gentleman', and the Emperor of the French, with an occasional touch of the Emperor of China, and a deterioration from the attributes of our famous townsman, Rufus W. B. D. Dodge Grumsher Pickville."

For Dickens is now a dramatic reader. He does the murder in Oliver Twist with indirect lighting, and reads of Tiny Tim till a young lady faints with the pathos of it all, and is carried out of the hall. And meanwhile the ideal of the English man of letters bids fair to be realized. Dickens sends shiploads of money to his English bankers. On the day before he leaves he sends word that he is making a clear profit of £1,300 each week, and is receiving, at the lowest, £430 each night. Who, under such solace, could be implacably angry with America? Certainly not an English man of letters. Moreover, there are old friends to meet, and Dolby, with his walking contest to Boston, is an excellent manager, and amusing. He gets through New Haven, Connecticut, Dickens notes with approval, without a row with the mayor. Utica is a frightful one-night stand, and Syracuse looks as if it had been "knocked together", but this time, although he reads to forty thousand New Yorkers, he keeps somehow his privacy. In the quiet of his room he has his first cocktail, a "Rocky Mountain sneezer", made of brandy, rum, and snow. American crudenesses on this second journey seem less horrible, and funnier. In St. Louis an old man submits a

paraphrase of the entire book of Job. He wants to read it aloud to Mr. Dickens and get his opinion of it. A letter comes from the South asking for an original epitaph for the tomb of an infant. Another Southern lady solicits an autograph copy of the lines by Mrs. Leo 'Hunter to an "expiring frog". But in these State competitions New Jersey bears the bell. A lady offers to submit a record of all the funny things which have happened in her family during the past one hundred years. Out of this material Dickens is to create a novel, and share the profits with the aforesaid lady. What could be more delightful? On the railroads the engineers artistically "bang" the cars together, breaking every suitcase possessed by the Dickens party; in New York there are disturbing fires every night and the independent American ushers strike, and spoil a lecture or two. But still— well, there are those checks. And one wonders whether "Boz" is not a little older and a little kinder than during the first visit. At any rate he went home "brilliantly paid”, as he phrased it, in spite of the competing interest of a presidential impeachment and some hostility because of American Notes. The newspapers still saluted him as "Charlie", and Main Street was not the Strand; but after all, there was improvement, and we were done with the hated institution of slavery. Dickens had he himself would have admitted it-hopes for us.

STANLEY T. WILLIAMS.

AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD

BY WILLIS FLETCHER JOHNSON

ALTHOUGH declination was a foregone conclusion, it was worth while to have the United States invited to participate in the réchauffage of Genoa at The Hague, for the sake of the replies which were given. Mr. Hughes in his letter to Mr. Child again disclosed the workings of a mind approximating Huxley's ideal of "a clear, cold logic-engine" in his impregnable and convincing exposition of the reasons why it was impossible for Republican America to have fellowship with Soviet Russia; reasons affected neither by the jingling of the hoped-for guinea nor by the glib camouflage of Moscow. Gladstone said that King Bomba had "erected the negation of God into a system of government". With equal truth it may be said that the Bolshevist oligarchs have formed a system of government out of aggressive negation of civilization and of humanity itself. Such a Government America cannot recognize; with it she can have no dealings. It may be too much to hope that the infatuated despots at Moscow will realize that fact; but surely the civilized Powers of Western Europe must now do so. In bringing them to that state of mind the Secretary of State has performed for them a service of the highest order; from which France seems inclined to profit by aligning herself with America. As for the suggestion which some have made, that America might well go to The Hague because the Conference there is to be purely economic, and not political as was that at Genoa, it is quite empty and futile. It was announced in advance that the Genoa Conference was to be exclusively economic, just as positively as the same announcement is now made about its adjourned session at The Hague. If that rule could not be enforced at the one place, there is no assurance that it can be or will be at the other.

VOL. CCXVI.-NO. 800

An admirable complement to Mr. Hughes's presentation of the political aspects of the case was provided by Mr. Hoover in his discussion of its economic aspects. His address before the Chamber of Commerce of the United States was solicitous and sympathetic, with a sincerity which nobody in Europe or America will question, and it was also inspiringly optimistic. He expressed a fine faith in the integrity and stability of civilization despite the delay of some nations in the work of rehabilitation after the war, and he gave adequate reason for that faith by pointing out the incontrovertible fact that all the lately combatant States on the Continent save only Russia have in the more than three years since the Armistice made very definite progress toward normal restoration. The mere fact that they can say, with Sieyés after the Reign of Terror, "We have lived!" is proof of the virility of their institutions. Mr. Hoover's mention of the fact that Russia alone has made no such progress is by implication a damning indictment of Sovietism, and a confirmation of Mr. Hughes's wisdom in declining to enter a Conference in which Soviet Russia participates; the economic incompatibility between that country and America being no less marked than the political and ethical. Finally, in his "five points" of rehabilitatory policy for Europe, the Secretary of Commerce displayed a constructive genius and rendered a constructive service at least commensurate with his criticisms.

The transfer of the Conference from Genoa to The Hague inevitably arouses suggestive and instructive memories of former international gatherings at that capital. The two great Peace Congresses, whose work is not to-day as dead as many seem to imagine, were due to the initiative of Russia, but it was not Soviet Russia. The chief obstructive force, which defeated some beneficent proposals and seriously impaired others, was Germany; and while it was not the Social-Democratic Germany of to-day, it was one little removed from it in spirit and purpose.

The decision of a United States court that the California alien land law does not conflict with the Constitution or with any treaty made thereunder is of great interest to other States than

the one for which it is directly made. The law forbids the owning of real estate by aliens who are not eligible to citizenship in the United States. It is, of course, aimed at the Japanese, and may prove effective for debarring them from realty holdings. There has never, we believe, been any question of the competence of a State to forbid land ownership to unnaturalized aliens. Various States have done this, and the United States Government has done so, too, in the Federal territories. The new California law discriminates against those aliens who are debarred from becoming citizens, and this, the court decides, is quite permissible. Of course it throws the onus of the whole controversy upon the Federal Government, which refuses naturalization to Asiatics or at least to Chinese and Japanese. The grievance which the Japanese believe they suffer is, therefore, not that California will not let them acquire land, but that the United States will not let them become citizens. If the United States would admit them to citizenship, not California nor any other State could debar them from land-holding. We may soon have before us the interesting spectacle of aliens who are unnaturalized and who prefer to remain unnaturalized becoming the owners of real estate, while that privilege is denied to others who earnestly wish to become citizens but are not permitted by the Government to do so.

Mr. Elihu Root's condemnation of slanderers of nations should be taken to heart by all who have any regard for friendly international intercourse, and for the honor of their country. "More quarrels," he truly said, “have come from insults than injuries; and that is doubtless true. Burke declared that he did not know the method of framing an indictment of a whole people; but there are unfortunately many who know and practice the method of slandering and insulting whole nations. Our journalism and oratory-even Congressional oratory-have for years been sullied with persistent propaganda against certain foreign nations, chiefly marked with gross untruth and with insult. It seems easy to "slang-whang" against other lands and their peoples, and is too often a means of acquiring or increasing political popularity. Obviously, it would be difficult to suppress or to punish all such brutalities, but it ought to be possible to discourage it and to