The returns of the Presidential election show that Mr. Taft's victory is decisive and overwhelming. His majority in the electoral college does not fall greatly short of Mr. Roosevelt's four years ago, and his majority of votes, taking the country as a whole, is at least a round million. The American people have given their decision upon the great issue before them with an emphasis that leaves nothing to be desired. Their friends in this country, where all are their friends, no longer bound by the reticence which courtesy demands of the spectators of a domestic contest, are free to express profound satisfaction with their choice. Mr. Taft's dignified career, his unsullied integrity, his strenuous public service, and his wide acquaintance with the conduct of great affairs abroad as well as at home, mark him out as exceptionally qualified to fill the great office to which he has been called. In addition to all these things, Mr. Taft stands for an intelligible and worthy policy known to all men in America and throughout the world. It is before all things a policy of national honesty, an endeavor to infuse into the conduct of business on the great scale the principles upon which the overwhelming majority of the people of the United States regulate their personal affairs and their private lives. That

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is the policy initiated by Mr. Roosevelt, and that is the policy which the American people confidently expect Mr. Taft to carry out. It is capable of being travestied as an attack upon Trusts, and in that character it has been copied by Mr. Taft's opponents. During the contest every one was loud in protestations of hostility to the Trusts, but the people have been able to distinguish between the real and the factitious, between a genuine desire to abolish evildoing and an opportunist denunciation of evildoers. Trusts, as Mr. Roosevelt has declared again and again, are not wholly and necessarily bad, but compounded of good and evil like most things human. They will not be reformed by those who attack them indiscriminately in the same spirit that produces their evil qualities. The evil in them can be dealt with by men inspired, not with hatred of trusts, but with love of goodness and enlightened regard for the public weal. The people of America, plied from all sides with superficially similar promises of reform, had to look beyond words and to decide who was the man best qualified by character, ability, experience, and associations to carry out genuine reform with quiet but persistent energy. They have made their choice alike decisively and wisely.

Mr. Taft's victory at the end of four months' furious campaigning is a much more decisive one than the Republicans expected or the Democrats feared. It is a strong national affirmation of the Roosevelt policies. In that sense it is a triumph for Mr. Roosevelt personally;

but it is also, we think, a triumph in another sense for the American people themselves. They have proved that they have grasped an intelligible policy for conducting the external relations of the country, and for replacing corruption by integrity at home; they may be

over again during the campaign that the working men were outraged by Mr. Roosevelt's stout personal denunciation of some of their leaders, and would certainly vote for Mr. Bryan. The President of the Labor Federation actually prophesied that eighty per cent of the votes of the Federation would be cast for Mr. Bryan. It is difficult to trace any such massive movement of Labor in the event. Mr. Roosevelt declared, what we are sure is true, that Mr. Taft would be the truer friend of Labor, and apparently the working men, who do not owe a very close allegiance to their organizations, believed him. It may be said that the very active intervention of Mr. Roosevelt in the campaign was undesirable, and there is a great deal in the theory which disapproves of the interference in free elections of persons occupying privileged positions. A wrong kind of influence may be brought thus into play, and this danger, of course, explains the British law which denies a Peer of the realm the right to take part in a Parliamentary election. An indulgent view is generally formed, as a matter of fact, of a Peer's intervention, as Mr. James Lowther used to be reminded annually to his chagrin; and we suspect that a like indulgence will generally be granted to Mr. Roosevelt. His intervention has been characteristically impulsive, and we think we might safely defy any one to say that it has not been sincere or honorable in motive. Really Mr. Roosevelt is so ardently anxious that the public life of the United States should match the respectability of private life, and he believes so deeply that Mr. Taft, as a man and a politician, would be more likely than Mr. Bryan to help the process of assimilation, that he has not been able to restrain himself from declaring his heart whenever there was an opportunity. There was one notorious episode when

he burst out to repudiate the disingenuous argument that because Mr. Rockefeller had publicly declared that he would vote Republican, therefore Mr. Rockefeller had very good reason to know that Mr. Taft had no thought of placing himself at the head of a serious movement against the Trusts. The Trusts, indeed, are in all men's minds. What will be done to reduce the corruptive license of powerful capitalistic machinery? Will anything be done? Or can anything be done? We have seen great corporations purchasing themselves grossly illegal advantages over their competitors, and, when they are brought before the law, using their wealth again to play off Federal laws against State laws, till all possibility of penalty is lost in à labyrinth of technicalities and a succession of delays. We have seen Mr. Hearst reading letter after letter in public to prove that well-known politicians were in the pay of the Standard Oil Company, the most powerful of all the Trusts. We do not underrate the difficulties of drawing the fangs of these dragons. The American Constitution is itself the greatest of all obstacles in the way. It is so conservative and so cumbrous,-so ill adapted to tackle problems quite unlike anything that was foreseen when the Constitution was established Then the Senate is a higher barrier, when it chooses to block any path, than any Upper House in the world. In many cases a two-thirds majority is needed, and a little stubbornness or intrigue makes that quite impossible to obtain. Our best hope is that, as there is already a normal two-thirds Republican majority in the Senate, Mr. Taft may be able to inspire it to good and willing service. We should have had little hope if Mr. Bryan had been elected, because he would indubitably have been looked upon as the enemy of commercial stability. In dealing

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with the Trusts it is absolutely necessary that commercial confidence should not be destroyed. Commerce is sensitive and timid. It is easily paralyzed, or else it flees the country. a problem in tact for the Republican Party, with Mr. Taft at its head, to combine an unremitting onslaught on corruption with the power to reassure the innocent. Revolutionary methods and ideas would be useless, and worse than useless. Trusts are themselves The Spectator.

a kind of Socialism, and dog does not eat dog. The Whig spirit of Mr. Taft has as good a chance as any influence we can conceive to carry on the Rooseveltian crusade of public honesty, while avoiding the incidental dangers which would end in reverses. The elections clearly show that it is the wish of Americans seriously to give this mandate to Mr. Taft, and every Englishman will heartily wish him "Godspeed."

The cheering admonition, "Keep Up Your Courage," is the title of a little volume of selections in prose and verse, edited by Mary Allette Ayer, and published by the Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co. They are chosen from a wide variety of authors, well-known and little known, and it is a rational and well-grounded courage which they inculcate.

Mr. Stewart Edward White's "The Riverman" is one of his studies of unrestrained human nature in situations so slightly influenced by convention that it is really free. The hero's field of action is a river in one of the Lake States, and his work combines the dangers of actually managing the spring journey of the logs and the more subtle perils of finance. The former part of the story is related with the ease of thorough knowledge and excellent literary ability, and is the better; the latter, although less fluent, is consistent with the first, and the two make an admirable character study. McClure Co.

The

The late Amos G. Warner's "American Charities," a pioneer work in its field, and still a standard authority, has been revised and enlarged and its

statistics brought down to date by one of the author's pupils and co-laborers, Mary Roberts Coolidge. (Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.) Nothing has occurred to affect the general principles or to change the conclusions in the work in which Dr. Warner first formulated them fourteen years ago; but there has been a great increase of interest in the study of applied philanthropy and economics in that period, and students and workers along these lines will find this new edition of Dr. Warner's work extremely helpful and suggestive.

"A Woman's Way through Unknown Labrador," by Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Jr., is a rare record of wifely devotion, for it is the story of the long hard days, and cold long nights, during which she completed the journey in Labrador, left unfinished by her husband. Their joint work is recognized by the geographical authorities of Europe and America as the sole journey in this field. Mr. Hubbard's account is in the form of a diary; Mrs. Hubbard's is the extended account written after her return to civilization. A map of Eastern Labrador shows the route of the brave pair, and their portraits and many pictures from photographs are the illustrations. The McClure Co.

"The Carolyn Wells Year Book" has a memorandum space for each day somewhere between its covers, but whether pages of those spaces shall alternate with pages of fun, or shall be separated by many pages of jokes is apparently decided by drawing lots or tossing up a cent, or some kindred method of literary selection. The Zodiacal signs are quite new, but the interpretation thereof is not given except in a frivolous way disheartening to a serious palmist; and the table of the metric system begins "Ten mills make a million." The best thing in the book is "The Defence of the Limerick" a succession of versions of "There was a young lady of Niger" written by famous poets dead and living. Not one of them approaches the thrilling simplicity of the original, and the limerick excelleth them all, Q. E. D. Henry Holt & Co.

The chief result of Mr Hamlin Garland's "The Shadow World" will be to leave the subject precisely where he found it as far as the greater number of his readers is concerned, but nevertheless the experiments reported by the author are both valuable and interesting, showing either that certain human beings have wonderful powers not yet analyzed or defined, or else that there are external, unclassified forces capable of influencing and even of directing human beings. Granting the former hypothesis, science is poor and incomplete; granting the latter, it seems necessary also to grant that the early Christian church was not so far wrong in regarding evil spirits as grim realities, and devising methods to defend man against them, or even unto this day maintaining the exorcist as one of the seven orders of the priesthood. Obviously if there be forces or beings capable of subverting all natural laws, it is at his peril that man meddles with them. Harper & Bros.

What song the sirens sang may be a doubtful matter, but that which Miss Beatrice Grimshaw voices in "In the Strange South Seas" so strongly suggests it, that it is best to appropriate the wisdom of the great Ulysses and take a double turn of a good stout rawhide rope about one's ankle and the table-leg before one begins to read; otherwise one may be seen gayly careering to the shore and embarking in a four-masted catboat, or anything else that comes in sight. Yet it is not all beauty which she finds in Tahiti, in Fiji, in Samoa or anywhere. There is leprosy; there are sharks, cockroaches and crabs; there are times when a woman sleeps with a revolver close to her fingers, but such things do not check Miss Grimshaw's eloquence and she ends as she begins. The call of the East seems feeble compared to that of the South Seas as rendered in this fascinating book. The illustrative photographs in the volume are less instructive than the text, but some of them are excellent, and all confirm it. J. B. Lippincott Co.

Mrs. Gertrude Atherton's "The Gorgeous Isle" is mysterious in its title, but otherwise is far better than the tales which she is accustomed to give her readers. The personages are Byam Warner, a native poet, and English visitors staying at Bath House, on Nevis Island, the "most ambitious structure ever erected in the West Indies." The poet, not being able to write without brandy, has taken the stimulant in disastrous quantities, and has become a social outcast. His friend, a certain Lord Hunsdon, persuades the ladies of the island to attempt his reform and brings about his marriage with an athletic young beauty born too soon in the early Victorian days. The young wife, having worshipped his genius long before seeing him, finds herself compelled to de