the Captain tried to explain to my languid feminine imagination (which could only look on, and listen, and gasp in amazement) 'la joie du combat'! That campaign in Morocco brought him chiefly fatigue and disappointment, since he and his black troops had little fighting to do, and were chiefly employed in convoying from sandy desert to sandy desert the provisions and munitions needed on the front. It brought him also, however, the material for a fine book-a fine, bitter, disenchanted, weary yet energetic book, eminently characteristic of its writer-Gens de Guerre au Maroc.'

One of his three fine books! It was not those, however, which brought him the celebrity, almost the fame, on which he was entering when he fell in battle. The ardent soul of Détanger had thrown his talent overboard, as a wandering apostle might fling from his wallet some useless bauble and go on unencumbered save by his staff and scrip. His last two books, the famous ones-' Le Chemin de la Victoire' and 'Le Conquérant-have indeed little literary grace and no sort of style; they are like those varnished Images d'Epinal in cut-out coloured paper which bring to the humblest cottage a sort of symbol of the wars of Napoleon, of the glories of Turenne; or again, like the Stations of the Cross in some wayside church. They preach a truth so august, and in the author's eyes so necessary to salvation, that art is of little consequence, the one thing needful being to make the meaning plain. That meaning was the same in each the saving grace of the Army, and the glorious fact that any young ne'er-do-well, any weak dilettante creature even, so he be brave and willing to consent to discipline, may find a personal salvation there, while building a bulwark of glory round his country.

I never really ventured to tell Emile Nolly what I thought of those books, so I said nothing about thema language which he perfectly understood and accepted with that grim, not untender smile of his. No one better than he knew the charm of art and romance. And I imagine he felt a certain fierce pleasure in flinging all that to the winds, in order, as he thought, to be more useful, reach a wider public, and influence it with the directness of a popular sermon. What use, after all, was there in his two stories of Indo-China, or in Gens de

Guerre au Maroc'? They were inclined, if anything, to inspire a morbid pessimism. On the whole, it is the first of his novels which I shall most often re-read'Hiên le Maboul,' a book so poignant, clear and mild in its sadness, that it haunts our imagination for years after the last page is closed. No one, perhaps, has so well expressed the peculiar beauty of Tonquin. When, after Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, the Frenchman reaches the Delta, his first instinctive expectation is of something stranger still; are we not here at the end of the world?

«Χθονὸς μεν ἐς τηλουρὸν ἠκομεν πεδον,

Σκύθην ἐς οἶμον, ἄβατον εἰς ἐρημιάν.

But what is this grey land where the silvery winter sunshine floats veiled by an imperceptible haze? Is it Brittany? Or a misty March day in the Landes, when the sun shines? And see, that ruined tower set on the round breast of a hill, with the far-off scaurs and peaks in the background—is it Auvergne? Nor, in the character of the conquered people, does there appear at first the difference that separates the Frenchman from the solemn Arab or the barbarous Kanak; the Annamite, with his wide intelligence, his keen and quizzical wit, his love of hearth and home, his respect for tradition and his religious indifference, appears at once a man and a brother. A certain aloofness adds to his charm. Such was the new and yet half-familiar world with which Emile Nolly made us acquainted. 'Hiên le Maboul' is a yellow brother of Loti's Mon frère Yves.'

And yet, on reopening the charming book (so appealing in its tender hopelessness, its elegant sobriety), I find, even here, the Pragmatist apostle who wrote Nolly's later works! For what is the nexus of the novel? It is surely the despair of the young French Lieutenant when he finds himself impotent to save the native tirailleur who, in an hour of moral anguish, comes to ask his infallible superior 'les paroles qui guérissent.' Alas, with all his science, the Ancestor with the two stripes' does not know the words that save; his philosophy affords him nothing but idle formulas void of faith and healing. And thenceforth his whole system of civilisation seems to him wanting and inefficacious. For Hiên goes out in silence and hangs himself on a banyan-tree.

Since then Nolly had learned the words that save. He was, I think, no ardent Catholic, like Psichari or Péguy; but his faith in the destinies of human society, his conviction that the army of France is indeed a Salvation-army, not only for Frenchmen, but for his dear Senegalese, for black, red and yellow-every shade of skin or soul-gave him the persuasiveness of the men of Napoleon's army. And he went out into the highways and the byways and compelled them to come in.

And now these young men-so much younger than I who, in this dreary, holy season of All Souls, sit by my lonely fire and remember them-these young men with a future, as it seemed, are all dead for their country and for the faith that was in them. Their bodies lie in wayside tombs, or in the middle of the fields, with a rough cross over them and a name traced in ink that the autumn rains efface. And that name, which was beginning to shine in the literary record of their nation, that name which they looked to burnish in the course of the next thirty years, can now receive no further lustre. From the personal, individualist, point of view, their fame is sacrificed, even as their lives are sacrificed. They are mulcted in their works, as in their race, for, among them all, only Péguy, I think, was a father. And, so far as they knew, their immense suffering and sacrifice was in vain, since their country is not yet delivered and redeemed. They lie, perhaps, among those dreadful heaps which the shell at once agglomerates and scatters, and from which all individual difference is wiped out. So many of them! these five are but a sign and a sample! But we who remain and remember-may we persist, and endure; may we bring, and lay on their tombs the flags of that victory for which they paid the price the day they fell in battle.

MARY DUCLAUX.

Art. 5.-AN ECONOMIC STOCKTAKING.

THE beginning of a New Year is an opportune time for taking stock of our financial and economic position. It is much too soon to put all the debit and credit items of the account against each other, nor can we think about striking a final balance; the most that can be usefully attempted is a collection of the materials which enable us to see where the nation stands after seventeen months of the costliest war ever known. In order to get a true perspective, it is necessary to marshal in due relation to each other facts and figures that are already more or less familiar. These are, however, of such great importance to every individual in the kingdom that a restatement of them for the purpose of estimating their combined effect on the national life may justify what might otherwise be considered needless repetition.

The most arresting and in some respects the most disturbing-fact is, not the extent of the burdens that have to be borne, but the way in which the people are bearing them. We are committed to a gigantic and increasing expenditure. We have already virtually doubled our tax revenue. We have raised nearly a thousand millions by loans and are looking forward to further borrowing. We are importing munitions, foodstuffs and other produce from foreign countries at the rate of about a million sterling a day in excess of our exports. We are compelled to pay a higher price for nearly every item in the cost of living. We accept as inevitable the fact that the country will be called upon to make still heavier sacrifices, and that the iron grip of taxation will be more relentlessly tightened. Yet one looks in vain for signs of national distress. On nearly every hand there are indications that our burdens are being borne, not only without serious privation or suffering, but almost with an air of jaunty indifference. These conditions are, however, to some extent superficial, and are far from justifying an optimistic state of mind. The prosperity of which they seem to be evidence is, more or less, a fictitious prosperity.

Mainly as a result of the great flocking of artisans to the army, and of the extraordinary demand of munition factories for labour, there is very little unemployment;

skilled workmen as a body are earning more than they ever earned; and, although people with small fixed incomes and those dependent upon casual brain work are obliged to be thriftier, there are very few symptoms of economic pressure. Every one tells every one else that retrenchment has become imperative, but the serious rise in the cost of food has not, so far, greatly interfered with the people's power to purchase a good deal more than necessaries. We are, indeed, confronted with the astonishing anomaly that, although economy is publicly urged on a scale which, a couple of years ago, would have been received with a cry of dismay—a scale involving for many of us a denial of agreeable and accustomed superfluities and although the nation is supposed to be going through an austere discipline, yet there is less poverty than there was in peace time, and the cheerfulness and comfort of the people verge on the ostentatious. In many provincial districts, where Government work is plentiful and wages are high, there is a regular demand for the best qualities of food, irrespective of price; workmen are furnishing their homes anew, and the musichalls and moving-picture shows are crowded several times a week. That so many workpeople are, for the time being, living in a Canaan of abundance, is due to a considerable part of the money voted for the war being paid in wages within the country. The distribution of 1,200,000l. a week to the wives and dependants of soldiers and sailors, making many of them much better off than they ever were before, is another contributory to this high tide of pecuniary welfare. Whether such conditions of unusual industrial plenty are conducive to thrift, may be doubted. We have yet to ascertain the full effect of bringing the worker who earns over 50s. a week within the operation of the Income Tax. In view of the certainty of new War Loans and yet heavier taxation one would like to see more self-denial among those who, when the war is over, and perhaps before, may be faced with economic difficulties in an acute form.

Our national resources are great, but a strain at least equally great is being put upon them. People have become so habituated to reading about thousands of millions that the figures roll glibly off the tongue without any adequate idea of what they signify. Nor