-fortified areas of Italy, including the naval base at Venice. This is the heart of modern Italy, and the hardest part to defend because it is a great plain dominated by the Austrian Alpine fastnesses to the north

Istria is part of Austria but predominantly Italian in population. Pola is the chief base of the Austrian Navy, and, with Trieste and Fiume, the principal salt-water outlet of the Empire. One of Italy's terms of peace is Italian control of this peninsula, which is the heart of the naval strategy of the control of the Adriatic Sea

WHERE 19,000 CHINESE STUDIED THE HEALTH EXHIBIT IN THREE DAYS The native photographer who took the picture to the left charged $9 for it and one other view, because the crowds of Chinese, eager to get in to see the exhibit, trampled over him and his camera, and then the police ran him off for obstructing traffic. Afterward he persuaded the police to drive the crowd away long enough for him to make two exposures. (Right:) "China Surmounting Its Burden of Disease." The full story of the little health drama of which this is the climax is told on page 553

AN AMERICAN PHYSICIAN-DIPLOMAT IN

CHINA

Dr. W. W. Peter and the Remarkable Success of His Original Methods of Converting the Chinese to Sanitary Reform-A New Way to Stop

the Spread of Oriental Diseases to the United States

BY

FRENCH STROTHER

(Our international relations, as a result of our entry into the World War, have taken first rank in interest in American minds. And though our instant problem is our relations with Europe, forehanded men see that, the moment the war stops, the Orient will become the gravest problem of our foreign policy, for Asia is the last stronghold of autocracy. Hence the importance of Dr. Peter's work, which is profoundly affecting public opinion in China, favorably to us.—THE EDITORs.)

D

R. W. W. PETER and the President of China met on twc occasions, the second of which may well be one of the turning points in the history of the world. That sounds ambitious-but one moment. Their first meeting was on a day in 1912, in a city in central China. Dr. Peter was the Red Cross physician-surgeon in charge of a little hospital in Wuchang. The future President, Li

Yuan Hung, was the general commanding the armies of the revolutionists who later forced the Manchus to abdicate the Dragon Throne. One evening a native messenger aroused Dr. Peter with the news that a whole company of Li's soldiers had been poisoned, and were dying in their barracks up the street. The doctor hastily gathered all the emetics and all the purgatives in his stock and hurried after the messenger to save their lives if he could. He

In his health lecture, Dr. Peter sets on a table a lamp the chimney on which is black with smoke, and asks one of his Chinese auditors to read from a newspaper by this light. Of course, the Chinese cannot see. Then he produces a similar lamp with a clean chimney and repeats the request. With this bit of symbolism caught by the audience, he produces these faces of "Two Classes of People," the one those whose view of life and effect on others is bad because they have darkened their light with bad health, and the other those whose lives and faces shine with the light of well-being

found a great dark room filled with Chinese soldiers in every stage of distress. There was no telling what poison had been used. Something must instantly be done. He mixed two pitchers full of medicine-one a powerful emetic, the other an equally energetic purgative. He then had the captain of the company order the least sick of his men to assemble in a line, and a coolie marched down the column, giving each man a teacupful of the emetic. Each man was ordered to fall out and get outout of doors after he had taken his dose, and to come back in ten minutes. Soon the barracks were emptied. Not much later the men returned, likewise and also! The line reformed, and the coolie went down it again, with the same teacup and the other pitcher in hand. Those who were very sick received individual attention.

And Dr. Peter left as fast as he had come. For he heard, between groans, round Chinese curses on the foreign devil who had given them the drafts. It was bad enough to be poisoned; was the sense of these rumblings, but the pangs they had suffered from the disease were nothing to those caused by the cure.

Nevertheless, none of the soldiers died. Hence General Li's invitation of a few days later, that Dr. Peter call and receive his thanks. They were duly given, with a medal besides.

Five years passed. Yuan Shih-kai had sat in the President's chair of the first Republic

of China, had tried to restore the Imperial power with himself as the head of a new dynasty, had failed, and now had left behind in this world his more than twenty wives and seventy children while he journeyed through the hells and heavens of the shadow-land beyond the Chinese River Styx. General Li came to the Presidential chair. The fugitive leader of the motley revolutionists of the South now stood within the Temple of Heaven in Peking, the northern seat of national power. He was ruler of the oldest and most populous nation on the globe. Four hundred million people acknowledged his claim to power.

Again Dr. Peter happened to be near and to fall under his eye. No longer the doctor at a lonely inland post, he was now the apostle of a national health service for all China that should lift from this people the curse of its yearly scourge of smallpox, typhoid, and the plague. Backed by the Young Men's Christian Association of America, encouraged and supported by provincial governors and mandarins and literati, speaking daily to eager thousands in the greatest Chinese cities, he had carried the message of sanitation up and down China until his reputation was nationwide among the Chinese of education and leading. He was speaking in Peking when word came that the President would be pleased to receive him. He went, with an appointment for half an hour. The thirty minutes were quickly gone in explanations of the mean