MISS MARY KINGSLEY. The loss that the nation has suffered by the death of Miss Mary Kingsley is much greater than is generally understood. People talk as if we had merely lost a striking, sympathetic and original personality, and a clear-eyed investigator of native customs and beliefs. In reality we have lost what is far more precious,-a woman capable of seeing essential facts and of understanding the political conditions existing in some of the obscurest and most difficult regions of the Empire. Remarkable from many and very different points of view, Mary Kingsley was, in our belief, most remarkable for her sane and statesmanlike views on African questions. She had already thrown a great deal of light upon the affairs of West Africa and the local administrative problems, and had she lived we doubt not that she would have made a real and most valuable contribution to our knowledge of the South African problem. Her strength lay in her ability to see through sham and humbug and "tall talk" of all kinds, and yet not become cynical or disillusioned. No one was less taken in than she by the cant of Jingoism, and yet she remained always a firm Imperialist, with an almost unbounded belief in the power of English-speaking men to take up Imperialist responsibilities and carry them through successfully. She was against hasty and ill-considered expansion and "rushes" of annexation, but she believed implicitly in the capacity of the race to govern subject peoples. But though she was always preaching caution and discretion in the march of Empire, it was impossible to frighten her as to the general ability of the nation to cope with its work. At a time when men are inclined to run into the extreme of Little Englandism on the one hand, and to dread all Imperial responsibility, and on the other to plunge into a wild and fanatic Imperialism without reason and without method, she held an even balance, and brought a most valuable corrective. The same good sense and level-headedness were displayed in her views of the native question. While feeling a deep sympathy for all natives, and anxiously desiring their welfare, she was entirely free from any exaggerated notions as to the perfectibility of the negro, and did not in the least desire to favor schemes for treating black men as if they were white. In fact, her main contention was always that you must not try to raise the negroes by giving them votes and representative institutions and the like, but by studying them and finding out the form of government which suited them best. She desired, as far as possible, to keep the blacks and whites apart, each within their own polity. For example, the present writer remembers talking to her on the native question in South Africa, just before she left England, and asking her whether she thought it would be possible to maintain a system of native reserves on a very large scale, like Basutoland, where, under Imperial officers, the natives could live their own lives unmixed with the whites, but whence the young men could issue for work in the mines or on the farms or elsewhere. To such a solution of the problem she most strongly inclined, and instanced examples from the West Coast which supported such a plan. On the whole she trusted to an enlightened and just separation of the black community from the white for the protection of the natives, much more than to any plan of giving them votes or a legal status equal to that of the white man. Put in its widest form, her plea in regard to the treatment of the native races was for justice and knowledge against emotionalism. She nowhere dealt better with this aspect of the question than in a most able and timely letter which she contributed to the Spectator of last January (January 13th, 1900), entitled by us "Miss Mary Kingsley on Efficiency and Empire." A part of this letter is so striking and so exactly representative of the working of her mind, that we need make no apology for quoting it at length: Our commercial expansion in the days of Elizabeth was marked by an intense love of knowledge of the minor details. If you turn back and read your Dampier or any of that school of Imperialism, you will find chronicled all manner of domestic details about the strange countries and peoples they came in contact with. Our colonial, or emigrant, expansion of the age of Victoria, either to the Americas or to Australia, has been marked by no such love of detailed knowledge; in its place there is emotionalism. The reason for this is obvious, but it has produced tiresome results. A back-wave of this emotionalism gave us the Indian Mutiny, but our Indian Empire, being a direct descendant of our older Imperialism, survived, and has returned to its earlier tradition. In other regions, however, emotionalism has had fuller play, and has been regarded as a substitute for detailed knowledge. I sincerely hope among the many good things this South African affair will surely give us, one will be the recognition that emotionalism is sitting at our council board in a place that should be occupied by knowledge. I beg you will not misunderstand me, and think that by emotionalism I mean either true religion or true huma sympathy. That emotionalism I so deeply detest and distrust is windy-headed brag and selfsatisfied ignorance. "I did not know," would have been no safe excuse to offer to Sir Francis Drake for a disastrous enterprise. This emotionalism has not spread dangerously yet among us. It is the nearest thing an Englishman can have to hysterics, and his constitution is not naturally inclined to them, but when he has them they are no use to him. They cannot help him to spread abroad his power, his religion, his justice, or his commerce. Yet undoubtedly he has, of late years, chosen this emotionalism for his counsellor in place of his Elizabethan counsellor, detailed knowledge, and this emotionalism has poisoned many of his noblest enterprises, has cost him much blood and money and heartache, and it has, above all things in the way of harm, made him suffer that grievous delusion, "the end justifies the means." I sincerely hope, now that it has had a showy breakdown, he will depose it, and replace that counsellor who so greatly helped to give him worldpower, and that will so greatly help him to both keep and expand it. The lesson detailed knowledge teaches is hard and dry. It says: Learn things as they are and keep your given word; let it cost you what it may, be just. Emotionalism says: Mean well, be merciful and generous; forgetting that mercy and generosity are only compromises made towards the attainment of justice, not in themselves justice, that perfect thing by which alone an Empire can endure and prosper, and which is attainable by honorableminded Englishmen by knowledge of the facts of the case. There is the epitome of Mary Kingsley's Imperial creed. It is a great plea for justice in the highest and widest sense. The late Mr. Pater somewhere defined justice as "a higher knowledge through love." That was the kind of justice Mary Kingsley wanted to see recognized as the foundation of our Empire, and that was why she asked always for facts and abhorred emotionalism, the bastard brother of love. Before we leave the subject of Mary Kingsley and the debt the Empire owes to her, we must say a word as to the fascination of her personality. She and to no other woman, of this generation. Of the more personal side of Mary Kingsley's loss, the present writer will not speak, except to say that those who had the happiness to call her friend knew that she was a friend in the true and not the conventional sense of the word. All that we care to deal with here is the loss suffered by the nation and the Empire, and that, as we have tried to show, is a great one. We can ill spare those who have width of mind as well as special knowledge in regard to our Imperial affairs, and Mary Kingsley had both in the highest degree. Brief, earnest and right to the point, the nearly three dozen sermons which make up the volume "David and His Friends" will be read by many with interest. The writer-or preacher-the Rev. Louis Albert Banks, originally made use of them as talks for a series of revival meetings, and they are admirably adapted to their purpose. The illustrations and anecdotes are well handled and forcible, besides covering a wide range of experiences, and the sincerity and manfulness of the sermons are evident. The character, life and times of David, and quotations from his writings, form the texts throughout the series. Funk & Wagnalls Co. Mr. Howells's Just the book to slip into one's pocket as one starts off for an outing, laugh over one's self, and loan to one's fellowtravellers, is "Room Forty-Five," Mr. Howells's clever description of the havoc wrought in the summer hotel by the guest who snores. favorite heroine-inconsequent and insistent as ever-her long-suffering husband, the hotel clerk and the snorer are the actors in the little comedy. In its companion volume, "Bride Roses," the note of sadness is struck with a delicacy which reminds us how much Mr. Howells's reputation, like others, has suffered by the preference which the public has shown for his lighter work. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Mr. Whitelaw Reid's discussion of "The Problems of Expansion," which The Century Company publishes, has a certain authority from the author's membership in the commission which negotiated the treaty of peace with Spain. The papers and addresses of which it is composed were written or spoken at various times during the past twenty months. Mr. Reid's initial point of view is indicated by the title of the first of these papers, published in September, 1898, "The Territory with which We are Threatened;" but he has been a consistent advocate from the first of the policy of retaining the whole of the Philippine archipelago, and he states his views and the reasons for them in this volume with virile force and persuasive logic. It is an interesting coincidence that Miss Eliza R. Scidmore's important and diverting book, "China, the Longlived Empire" should have been just ready for publication, when the breakup of the Empire began with the crisis precipitated by the demonstrations of the "Boxers." The book was not written for the occasion, but it precisely fits the occasion. Tientsin, Peking and other places, which have been lit up of late with the lurid light of a nameless horror, are here described as they appeared but recently to a bright and observant traveller, who saw them under peaceful conditions, when first signs of unrest were manifesting themselves. Miss Scidmore is chance traveller, for she has visited China frequently; and her sketches of Chinese life, character and politics, her portrait of the Dowager Empress, and her studies of social and political conditions make this the freshest, most picturesque and most vivid description of China and the Chinese that has been given us. The work is of absorbing in the no A volume which will go far to increase North America's knowledge of South America is "The Columbian and Venezuelan Republics," by William L. Scruggs, who, in his capacity of minister plenipotentiary of the United States to those countries, has had unusual facilities for studying the places and the people. It is a book of travel, taking the reader on many entertaining jaunts, but it is also a study of political situations and present or future industrial conditions. Written in a direct and pleasing style, with an evident seriousness of purpose, a strong sense of justice, and, withal, an appreciation of the humorous, it is a wise and companionable book. Little, Brown & Co. The "new theology," as a phrase for extreme conservatives to conjure with, may be robbed of its terrors by a calm reading of Walter Spence's "Back to Christ," published by A. C. McClurg & Co. It is a remarkably clear, simple and devout attempt to show that the supreme authority of the Christian church is to be found in the person of Christ, and to prove that "higher criticism" has not enfeebled the Christian faith, but has put new life into it by the use of a newer language. In the chapter on the nature of Atonement and on the Trinity, the book is eminently earnest and direct. While there are some people who will not reach Mr. Spence's conclusions, the book must be considered as adding greatly to the honest understanding which should prevail between the adherents of the "old" and the "new," and to readers not strongly attached to either division it will commend itself as an exceedingly satisfactory presentation of Christian thought and faith. The sonorous title, "The Dread and Fear of Kings," which belongs to J. Breckenridge Ellis's story of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, is rightly applied, for the book gives a graphic picture of an age when no man's words or glances were his own. There are many welldrawn characters, among them the Greek Alexis, an architect, who is summoned to Rome to superintend the building of a secret passage for the Emperor, and finds himself in a perilous network of treacheries. The real hero is the freedman and poet, Phaedrus, and the two heroines are a spirited Roman maiden and a brave Jewess. A complication of love affairs, in which pleasure-loving Greek, fighting Roman and high-souled Thracian are all involved, gives an added element of excitement to a stirring book. A. C. McClurg & Co. The Ingersoll Lectures on Immortality, delivered year by year at Harvard, as they appear in book form, make a collection of great interest for the lay as well as the theological library. To a list already notable is now added the name of Prof. Josiah Royce. Premising that the immortality which he asserts is an immortality of the individual, Prof. Royce directs attention to the elusive character of that which we call individuality, defines an individual as a being that adequately expresses a purpose, points out that only the Absolute can be an entirely whole individual, and maintains that the real world, viewed as a whole, is a unique expression of His purpose, so that every fragment of life therein has its unique place in His life. Thence, he argues the conscious attainment, in a life that is not the present mortal life, of that individuality which now is meant and sought. "The Conception of Immortality," it is needless to add, will repay careful reading. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. |