as

Both in the Transvaal and in the Philippines this course has been pursued in order to suppress guerrilla warfare. It is indefensible. It cannot be defended on the ground that it is war. When an armed public contest between nations under the sanction of international law to establish justice between them is going on, it does sometimes become necessary to destroy private property without compensation and to inflict injury upon non-combatants as the only means of obtaining victory over combatants, though even in time of war this is permissible only under the stress of extreme necessity. But, if we accept Charles Sumner's definition accurate, there is no longer war either in the Transvaal or in the Philippines. The destruction of private property, the inflicting of irretrievable injury upon non-combatants, cannot be justified, therefore, on the ground that it is a war necessity. And it certainly cannot be justified on the ground that it is a necessary measure of government in a community not in a state of war. It is the first function of government to protect the right of peaceable citizens to their persons and their property. England has no right in the Transvaal, America has no right in the Philip pines, unless each can, by the exercise of its sovereignty, protect persons and property in those territories. Our only justification for our being in the Philip pines is that we have assumed the responsibility for exercising such protection, and that we cannot transfer this responsibility to the imperfect government of Aguinaldo. Destroying the property of non-combatants can neither be justified as a war measure nor as a means of public justice in a community not at war.

It is said that the guerrillas are practically bands of robbers. Then they should be treated as bands of robbers. We do not destroy private property or drive peaceable citizens into exile because their country is plundered by robbers. We do not destroy the farms nor cut the telegraph wires in the far West because train robbers plunder railroad trains. Neither on the ground that there is war nor on the ground that there is not war can the destruction of private property and the shooting or exiling of innocent men in the Philippines and in the Transvaal be justified.

We repeat, neither guerrilla warfare nor the destruction of private property of peaceable citizens in order to prevent guerrilla warfare is war; and neither is justifiable.

Morality in Fiction

The article by Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon) on "The French Novel and the Young Girl," which appears in this issue of The Outlook, is interesting by reason of the distinction of the writer, the importance of her subject, and the light thrown upon the perplexing question of the degree of freedom with which certain matters shall be dealt with in literature. Madame Blanc is one of the foremost women of the time in dignity of life as well as in literary position and reputation; she interprets the French attitude towards the young girl with clearness and with authority. The American attitude is entirely different; but both peoples aim at the preservation, not only of purity, but of the bloom of the young imagination. The French believe that this can best be preserved by keeping the girl, so far as possible, ignorant of certain aspects of life; the American does not, if he is wise, wholly dissent from this view, but he believes that it is safer to impart the knowledge gradually than to let it come with a sudden shock, as often happens in the experience of French women. If the French restrict the reading of young girls too rigidly, it is certain that, in many cases, Americans leave it too completely without oversight or direction.

This question is part of the larger question of the proper limits of the disclosure of evil and of the knowledge of life in fiction. On that question there is evidently great difference of opinion and much confusion of thought.

In the first place, it must not be forgotten that there are many kinds of immorality. Much, if not most, of the criticism of books seems to proceed on the theory that too frank or too fervent descriptions of sins of passion are the only qualities which make immoral stories. This is not true; there are many kinds of immorality; and many stories which are widely accepted as ethically sound and even religious in their influence are essentially immoral. Any book which departs from the truth of experience, and presents a view of life which is not

confirmed by the facts, is a false book, and therefore an immoral book; for nothing is so fundamentally immoral as falsehood. This was not only the fault but the vice of a good many so-called Sunday-school books, which put before young readers a view of life which was wholly misleading; which substituted self-complacent prigs for sound, sane, genuinely religious men and women; which identified the life of piety with morbid and unwholesome experiences; which misrepresented the Infinite by making Him the partisan patron of goody-goody children and the partisan foe of those children in whom nature was more powerful than conventions, and who were often healthy when they were portrayed as vicious; and, worse than all, which interpreted the moral government of the world as a system of retail bargains of so many good deeds for so many rewards. Books of this class have largely, though not entirely, disappeared; they were thoroughly bad, fundamentally immoral, and intellectually vulgar.

In this class must also be placed a large number of stories which are widely read by good people because they deal with the moral and religious side of life; books which are widely acclaimed as religious literature and are sold in vast quantities because they are supposed to appeal to the best in their readers. These books are immoral because they exaggerate, misrepresent, and distort the facts of life; they turn the struggle between good and evil into a lurid melodrama, and vulgarize every moral or religious issue they touch. They are to real fiction what yellow journalism is to real journalism; they pander to wellintentioned but unreflecting people much as the cheap sensational theater panders to the frivolous and prurient. They are read by hundreds who would not touch "Anna Karenina " or " Resurrection," and yet they are not fit to stand on the shelves beside those tremendous tragedies of the moral life.

In the second place, it must be remembered that a book is not immoral because it deals with an immoral act. Ignorance of this fact has led to a great deal of confusion in the minds of many good people. A very large part of the greatest and most significant art of the world deals with immorality. The essence of tragedy is conflict, and conflict is almost always

the collision between the will of the individual and the will of God, as that will is expressed in the order of the world, the institutions of society, and the laws of civilized peoples. This conflict, in the record of which the spiritual history of the race is largely written and which supplies some of the richest material with which the imagination deals, has absorbed the creative genius of the world and has been the chief theme of much of its sublimest art; for art is at bottom an interpretation of the soul of man, of its relation to the world about it and of the order of that world. If morality, as Coleridge declared, is "the practice of duty; obedience to the moral law; virtue; goodness," then immorality is the reverse of these qualities, the denial of these virtues, departure from these standards. Now, it is precisely these denials and departures with which great literature deals; because through these inversions, perversions, and violations of the moral law and the moral nature the moral structure of the world comes into view and the fathomless significance of man's life in this world is revealed. The Old and a considerable part of the New Testament; the serious dramas, from Æschylus to Browning and Ibsen; dramatic poetry; and, above all, the noblest fiction, have dealt with immoral acts. Their high significance lies in the fact that they bind such acts to the actors by the very laws of life and write the story of man's career in terms of character. The Old Testament, the Greek tragedies, the tragedies of Shakespeare, Milton's "Paradise Lost," Scott's "Heart of Midlothian," Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," George Eliot's "Adam Bede," and Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" hold their places securely, not only as works of art, but as the great moral text-books of the race.

The essence of immorality in a novel is some kind of falsehood. This falsehood may take the form of separating the evil act from its consequences; this is the sin of the novel which portrays the pleasures of sensuality without instantly bringing into view its appalling retributions. It may take the form of exaggeration and perversion of the place and function of passion in normal experience; this is the offense of a small class of books like D'Annunzio's "Flame of Life," which is an expansion of

passion to the very limits of experience, to the exclusion and repression of rectifying and correcting activities and interests. It may take the form of a too luxurious and alluring picturing of the sensuous life; a description which stimulates the imagination by its warmth, and awakens emotions to which art ought never to appeal. In stories of this kind the falseness consists in ignoring the essential vulgarity or vileness of the sin and its terrible reaction. It may take the form of too great frankness; many things which are not only good but sacred in their place and time become corrupt and corrupting when the light of publicity falls on them. The Greeks, with a true and sensitive instinct, shunned the horrible, and the bloodiest deeds in their tragedies were performed off the stage. There are sharp limits to wholesome expression; that which is pure in experience may lose its sanctity when it is hinted in speech; that which may be rightly suggested in a story or poem may be intolerable on the stage with the added emphasis of acting. If vice is to be wisely and wholesomely represented or dealt with in fiction, it must be bound always to its consequences; it must be pictured with restraint, for serious ends; it must not awaken either sympathy or desire; and it must observe that law of relation or fitness which makes men instinctively surround some natural and wholesome things with privacy. Every book which arouses passion, inflames the imagination, makes vice attractive, or portrays it too vividly, stains the mind and is to be shunned.

Many books which are entirely moral are not for young readers; this is a principle which it is difficult to apply, but it is clear and fundamental in the whole matter. The French go much further in disclosure of all kinds of experience than men of English blood, and there is special reason for keeping a great deal of French fiction out of the hands of young girls. The instinct and the training of the Englishspeaking race have kept it reticent where the French have been absolutely frank; and it is to be hoped that this deep-going repugnance to the free handling of the mysteries of life will not wear away. This instinct is not only moral, but is artistic as well. There is much even in good literature which is not proper food for the young imagination. The knowledge of

life should come slowly and with sufficient interpretation from experience to give it perspective and rob it of that which feeds a morbid curiosity. To confine all literature to the experience of young readers would be manifestly absurd; it is necessary, therefore, to keep back certain kinds of books, not because they are impure, but because they are too far in advance of a child's experience. "Adam Bede" and "The Scarlet Letter" are stories of stainless purity, but they are not for the youngest readers. "Vanity Fair" is not for childhood, simply because the experience of childhood cannot interpret it. It is not easy in every case to draw the line between maturity and immaturity, as it is not easy in every case to draw the line between prudishness and too great frankness of speech; it must be drawn, as it is drawn every day in countless homes, by good sense and a knowledge of the individual reader. A moral book may produce an immoral effect upon a mind which is not prepared by experience to receive it; on the other hand, it must be remembered that wholesome boys and girls often read very mature books without an inkling of the things which might harm them. The decision rests with those who are responsible for youth, and it is for this reason that the reading of the young ought to have wise guidance and direction. Knowledge of evil cannot be withheld, but it must be imparted when intelligence, experience, and sound moral instincts have prepared the mind to receive it.

Dangerous Foes

It was said of Jeremy Taylor that "nature had befriended much in his constitution, for he was a person of most sweet and obliging humour, of great candour and ingenuity. . . . His soul was made up of harmony; and he never spoke but he charmed his hearer, not only with the clearness of his reason, but all his words, and his very tone and cadences, were musical." This disclosure of a winning temper in a man of great genius finds its explanation in part in certain comments of the eloquent preacher touching what he calls little vexations:

"... be careful to stifle little things," he writes, "that as fast as they spring they be

cut down and trod upon; for if they be suffered to grow by numbers, they make the spirit perish, and the society troublesome, and the affections loose and easy by an habitual aversation. Some men are more vexed with a fly than with a wound; and when the gnats disturb our sleep, and the reason is disquieted but not perfectly awakened, it is often seen that he is fuller of trouble than if, in the daylight of his reason, he were to contest with a potent enemy. In the frequent little accidents of a family a man's reason cannot always be awake; and, when the discourses are imperfect, and a trifling trouble makes him yet more restless, he is soon betrayed to the violence of passion."

This goes to the very heart of the undoing of fine natures by small discomforts, petty annoyances, little troubles. They lose serenity, sweetness, and dignity because they fail to recognize the fact that a sting may be as dangerous as a wound, and that the trifle which costs a man his self-respect is as important, so far as he is concerned, as the great provocation which throws him into passion.

Character is fundamental in all relations; without it there is no real, genuine, effective human intercourse or co-operation. In all conditions and for all purposes it is essential that we be able to trust our fellow and to secure and hold his confidence. Next to character the most essential qualities for comfort, peace, and happiness are sweetness and serenity of spirit. These qualities are atmospheric iu their nature; they diffuse themselves through space; they make the weather in which we live; they flood us with sunlight or blight us with chill and gloom. Cheerfulness and sweetness are commonly regarded as temperamental; in many cases they are the natural expressions of harmonious and well-balanced natures. they are quite as often the "lovely fruits of forgotten toil;" qualities which, by patience, care, and persistence, have been developed out of the most unpromising soil by refusal to yield to the tyranny of small vexations and the wear of wearisome details which of necessity fill a large place in every life.

But

These petty annoyances crowd every path of work or pleasure, and one must elect whether he will brush them aside with a strong hand or permit them to spring up and choke the finer growths in his soul. The irritable man is something more than a trial to the men who work with him and something worse than a

steady discomfort; he is a depressor of vitality and therefore a waster of power. The warm, genial air does not invite delicate things out of the soil more potently than does the man of serene, sunny nature call forth the best energies of his co-workers. When such a man is in command, no time need be lost in attempts to make working adjustments with him; every man can put his whole force into his task. The irritable, peevish spirit in the household, succumbing to every petty annoyance, is absolutely fatal to that sweet and deep peace in which alone the affections put forth all their tendrils and bear their most delicate blossoms. There are women about whom the whole world blooms; where they are it is always June.

There is something pitiful in the defeat of a man by insignificant foes. When a strong nature falls before a powerful antagonist, there is the sense of tragedy, but there may be no sense of humiliation; but when a sting does the work of a wound, there comes a certain feeling of contempt. In the battle of life, which is a struggle, not only for integrity, but for sweetness, serenity, and peace, every man owes it to his fellows to make a brave fight. There is a kind of treason in surrender to petty foes. There are so many great troubles in life, so many appalling calamities, so many heavy burdens to be borne, and such difficult tasks to be performed, that it is cowardly to yield peace and sweetness to insignificant assaults on patience and good temper.

We are bound, not only to resist the things that imperil our integrity and peace, but to aid and succor our fellows. The man who flies into a passion because some small thing goes wrong, who is peevish, irritable, and disagreeable when additional work comes unexpectedly or unforeseen accidents occur, not only makes life harder for every one about him, but makes it harder at the very time when it is his plain duty to make it easier. The moral of the whole matter is that there are no small things; that the annoyance, however apparently insignificant, which costs a man his temper, is really important; and that we owe our fellows the duty of sweetness and cheerfulness quite as much as the duty of fidelity and honesty. On the eve of Agincourt, the quiet hopefulness of Henry V. was worth

another army to the decimated English. In the ebb and flow of the daily struggle of men in the work of the world, the cheerful and sunny are bringers of strength and harbingers of victory.

but an intellectual conception has taken the place of an imaginative picture; a theory has been substituted for a Person. He might not be willing to call himself an agnostic, and yet much that he once fancied he knew concerning God he confesses to himself he no longer knows. He believes

Century

Those who have ever read John Fiske's portrayal of his childhood conception of God will not easily forget it:

I remember distinctly the conception which I had formed when five years of age. I imagined a narrow office just over the zenith, with a tall standing desk running lengthwise, upon which lay several open ledgers bound in coarse leather. There was no roof over this office, and the walls rose scarcely five feet from the floor, so that a person standing at the desk could look out upon the whole world. There were two persons at the desk, and one of them—a tall, slender man, of aquiline features, wearing spectacles, with a pen in his hand and another behind his ear-was God. The other, whose appearance I do not distinctly recall, was an attendant angel. Both were diligently watching the deeds of men and recording them in the ledgers. To my infant mind this picture was not grotesque, but ineffably solemn, and the fact that all my words and acts were thus written down, to confront me at the day of judgment, seemed naturally a matter of grave concern.

Probably most of us who have passed middle life can recall a somewhat analogous picture of the deity, differing widely in detail, but essentially analogous in its conception of a very human God, generally royal or judicial in temper and office. And probably most of us have lost this conception forever. God is no longer to us thus localized and personified. Have we in this change also lost our faith in a personal God? Has he ceased to be a Person, and become a Law, a Power, or an Energy? If so, the loss has been incalculable, for it has been nothing less than the loss of religion. And it is but a poor recompense that the conception which has taken the place of the childish con ception has gained in grandeur what it has lost in definiteness.

Doubtless such a change has come over the experience of many a modern thinker. He still believes that there is a Great First Cause, an Infinite and Eternal One, a universal Presence, a "Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness;"

God's throne. If he dared to ask himself the question, Is God a Person, or does he transcend personality? he could hardly answer. If he seeks to define his thought of God, he finds it is a thought of a universal, ever-present, all-pervasive Energy, immanent in all nature, perhaps in all history, but personified nowhere. His belief in the divine immanence has enlarged the thought of God's majesty and power, but dimmed the glory of his person. The childhood form of theistic belief is lost; and though he would not say what Professor Clifford, with an abandon of frankness, has said, yet there is something in the sorrowful skeptic's experience which responds to Clifford's lament: "We have felt that the Great Companion is dead." The sense of duty toward his fellow-man is clearer than ever, and his desire to fulfill this is stronger and more resolute; but his reverence, his trust, his worship, is more vague, if not almost objectless. Frederic Harrison's suggestive phrase, "the ghost of religion," not inaptly describes the shadowy substitute which in many a life has taken the place of the very human awe and reverence for a very human God which formerly constituted the inspiration of worship, public and private. For there is but one answer, and that a negative one, to Frederic Harrison's question: "In the hour of pain, danger, or death, can any one think of the Unknowable, hope anything of the Unknowable, or find any consolation therein?" One may resent his seeming irreverence and yet one cannot reply to the argument which it involves: The formula (x") is the exact mathematical expression of the unknown raised to its highest power of infinity; but who, when the Unknown and Unknowable is substituted for his childhood conception of a human God, can seriously continue his earlier worship, changing its formula into the cry, "O X", love us, help us, make us one with thee!"

There can be no religion if there be no faith in a personal God; for religion is