But the foreign Powers are certainly on the horns of a dilemma, for a repudiation of Peking would necessarily entail the recognition of some other faction. But which? There are so many aspirants to supreme power, each one of whom dictates, almost daily, to Peking, that to support any of them with a view to facilitating the creation of a stable and strong government would be equivalent to backing a horse in a race in which there are twenty starters.

The attitude of the foreign Powers, with regard to the present Peking Government, therefore becomes one of avoidance from slipping from the frying pan into the fire, and as long as these conditions prevail the Central Government will continue to stew in its own fat.

Indications are, however, not wanting that this anomalous state of affairs cannot last much longer and that some kind of change must take place in spite of the supineness of the ordinary Chinese citizen. Generally speaking, he takes no interest in politics beyond those that concern his own village pump, and it is all the same to him whether the Anhui, the Chihli, the Anfu, the Mukden, the Kuomintang or any other faction is supreme in the land. Lately, however, he has been subjected to more than ordinary interference by bandit bands of discharged and undischarged soldiers, who have burned and looted to an extent that has made him 'furiously to think.' He is now in a frame of mind susceptible to any influence that approaches him for the purpose of stirring up his lethargic village blood, the sluggishness of which has hitherto prevented him from looking across the border.

The first to take action is the merchant class, which is organizing a nation-wide protest against the militarists and denouncing the tuchuns as men who

are ruining the country. The merchants are being supported by the students, and Labor has cast in its lot with both. But the movement has been checked temporarily owing to unfortunate happenings during a strike by railway

men.

Briefly, the right to strike was denied them by the authorities who seized and executed a number of their leaders, on the plea that they were not workers but mere hired agitators and 'disturbers of the peace.' It is the familiar cry of Capital all over the world: the workingman would be content and happy if it were not for those professional agitators!. Ordinary people are allowed to engage professional advisers - lawyers - to fight for them and to conduct their cases in court, but Labor, the members of which undeniably are incapable of presenting their case in a proper manner, are denied this right. And so a poor lawyer and others who were engaged to help the workers were made a head shorter by the authorities.

These events have so frightened the merchants that they have cancelled the date originally set for the nation-wide demonstration against the tyranny of the tuchuns, but it is safe to assume that a fresh impulse will soon again be given to the movement. Such demonstrations will of course not do away with these provincial leeches, but they will at any rate clearly show the feelings of the populace toward their tormenters and to that extent lessen the burden of those who will eventually have to remove them.

It is but a few months since the present writer pointed out the remarkable difference between Dr. Sun Yat-sen and all the other claimants for power, inasmuch as the former, in spite of his having been utterly defeated in a military sense and having been compelled to flee from his capital (Canton), nevertheless continued to exercise an

influence in the land second to none of the tuchuns with armies to back them up.

It was described at the time how this defeated leader was being made. much of by all parties sending emissaries to his humble abode in the French Concession in Shanghai, and now we find Dr. Sun again in Canton in his old office as President of the Southwest.

How are these things to be explained? These tuchuns, generals, and presidents, whether acting, dismissed, or fleeing for their life, seem to travel all over the country without anybody doing them any harm. It would, for instance, have been as easy as possible to have prevented Dr. Sun and his party from reaching Canton if 'enemies' had been so disposed; but nothing happened. On the contrary, on his arrival in Hongkong, which has hitherto been anything but friendly toward Dr. Sun and his political creed, the Governor of that British colony fêted him at dinner, the students of the university were permitted to carry him shoulder high, and a royal reception was given to him and his party before they betook themselves to Canton. Why this remarkable change from the breath

of a refrigerating chamber to the temperature of a greenhouse?

Is it too much to assume that when Peking, Chang Tso-lin, Wu Pei-fu, and all the other party leaders have clearly shown that they are impotent as long as they have the Doctor against them, the foreign Powers, led by Great Britain, have come to the same conclusion? The foreign Powers can do nothing in China as long as they have Sun Yat-sen against them. And he, the so-called dreamer, the unpractical, the visionary, as he has been so frequently dubbed by the foreign press, has been so practical as to realize that, as long as he has the foreign Powers against him, he can do little or nothing for China. And that is probably the reason why, a few weeks before his departure for Canton, he issued a manifesto in which, among other things, the important admission was made that China stood in need of foreign capital in order to develop her mineral wealth, railways, industries, and so forth.

From that moment there has not been a discordant note in the official foreign press in its comments on Dr. Sun and his doings in Canton. We all now understand each other, and it is a beautiful world.

VOL. 317-NO. 4119

THEOPHILE GAUTHIER has written that Africa begins at the Pyrenees, and some Spaniards have never forgiven him this statement; but for my part I prefer to say that Europe does not end until the Sahara Desert begins. For the Mediterranean Sea unites the inhabitants of its shores far more than it divides them. Around this beautiful inland sea the most ancient civilizations of history had their birth, developed in their strength, and then passed down the torch of civilization one to another. There is such a thing as a Mediterranean world, and northern Africa, which to-day is almost entirely French, has always been a part of it.

The Greek myth of Hercules opening a way between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic rests upon fact; at least it is certain that at a relatively recent geological period Spain and Morocco were united by land, and it is probable that at the same time Italy was united with Tunis. One encounters the same strata of rocks on the two banks of the Mediterranean, the same plants and the same animals. Everything bears witness to their oneness, even the troops of monkeys that clamber among the rocks at Gibraltar.

The Greeks bestowed upon the whole of northern Africa between the Mediterranean and the Sahara the name of Libya, which is to-day reserved for the desert country lying between Cyre

naica and Egypt; the Romans gave the name of Africa to Tunis, and we have to-day extended its application to the whole continent. Numidia and the two Mauritanias extended from the Roman province of Africa toward the west, and Arabs called this country Moghreb, or the Western Country, since it was the most westerly of all their conquests. Historians and students of ethnography suggest the name Berbery, because the Berbers have been its inhabitants since the beginning of historic time and still form the chief part of its population.

Did the Berbers come from the plateaux of Abyssinia, Asia Minor, or Spain? We do not know - probably we never shall. The Romans, who understood well enough that the present emerges from the past, endeavored to get some kind of idea about the history of the peoples with whom they fought, so as to make it easier to govern them. Sallust, learned and gifted with an inquiring mind, traveled here and was a governor of Numidia. He is said to have been recalled because of graft, but it is the historians who say this and perhaps they may be suspected of envying a brilliant colleague.

However that may be, Sallust has preserved for us a tradition handed down by Hiempsal II, who wrote the history of the Numidians. According to him the land is said to have been peopled by the Gætulians and Libyans,

savages who lived on meat and chewed grass like animals. After the death of Hercules in Spain his army is said to have broken up for lack of a leader; the Persians, the Medes, and the Armenians crossed the Strait, where they mingled with the native Africans, who gave birth to the Numidians and Moors.

Hiempsal probably sets down one of those myths with which the fertile imagination of the Greeks supplied their own history and those of other peoples. It rests on a foundation of fact, since northern Africa has been a melting pot for the various races who have here mingled to form the Berbers. In the Djurdjura, in the Ahures, and in Algeria, the variety of human types in which the color of the hair goes from pale reddish to black, and the color of the skin goes from pink to a very deep brown - indicates the diversity of origin. In certain Moroccan tribes blondes are very numerous, and someone has said that the members of Djemma, that is the council of the Kabyles, differ from the Conseil municipal of a French village only in their clothes. Egyptian documents speak of the Libyan barbarians, whom they represent with a white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. This race seems to have extended from eastern Europe to the Sahara, and from Mt. Sinai to the Canaries, where we find people who were certainly Berbers.

In the Atlas Mountains and the Souss district of Morocco, through the whole Sahara down to the Niger River, the same language is spoken with various dialects. This language is written in old Libyan letters that form the tefinah alphabet of the Tuaregs. This similarity of language, and the existence of an alphabet which is distinct from all the other alphabets known, indicate an ancient organization, which implies a degree of unity and the beginning of a civilization. Europe had

to wait for contact with Asia before she had any way of writing.

Adhering strictly to established facts, it is possible to assert that southern and eastern Europe and northern Africa were partly peopled by several of the same races, for the Iberians and the Celtiberians of Spain are cousins of the Berbers.

Northern Africa makes its entrance into history about the twelfth century before Christ, when the Phoenicians had established themselves on its coasts. Confined between the Libyan Desert and the sea, this race of merchants rapidly became sailors, and in its chief cities, Tyre and Sidon, there soon sprang up that 'Fair of the Nations' of which the Prophet Isaiah speaks- a vast market where everything was for sale. But since these people had no art and no literature, their civilization has passed away and it is difficult to discover traces of it. Sometimes it seems as though they perfected industries that were already known to the Egyptians, such as the making of glass and bronze. Viewed in this light they are rather important, for they were the means of spreading Oriental knowledge around the Mediterranean basin and they developed from the Egyptian alphabet the twenty-two letters from which our own are derived.

The Greeks, first rivals of the Phoenicians, swarmed through the northern Mediterranean; their only African station is Cyrene. These two seafaring peoples came into contact in Sicily and struggled there for a long time; Carthage, originally a Phoenician colony, took the place of Tyre, which fell into decadence. It made an alliance with Xerxes against the Greeks, and then with Rome against Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus.

Carthage in her turn colonized the coasts of Spain, and the Carthaginian admiral Hanno established three hun

dred stations on the Atlantic coast, among them Tingris (the modern Tangiers) and Solah (the modern Sale, opposite Rabat), and the most southern of these stations was in Guinea. Carthage held Sardinia, took Corsica away from the Phoenicians, and held all the islands of the Mediterranean. She grew steadily until opposite her another rival began to appear and war with Rome began for the possession of Sicily.

Phoenician civilization played the same part in Africa that it played in Tyre and Sidon - the part of the mediary. Being essentially mercantile in character it paid no attention to the people of these stations except as they afforded markets for industry.

It made use of the Berbers as mercenaries in its armies, where they met soldiers from the whole Mediterranean world, under the command of Greek officers who insisted upon using their own language in military commands. In this way the Berbers found their way to Spain, Gaul, and Italy, and subdued all the islands of the western Mediterranean. Those who survived returned to their homes with amazing and confusing memories and a prodigious vision of the world with its likenesses and differences. But not for a moment did their Carthaginian masters make the slightest effort toward organizing the scattered peoples among whom they established themselves. It was by imitation, by mere influence, that some of the Berbers came to worship the gods of Carthage as well as their own, and that they began sometimes to speak the Carthaginian language.

Roman policy was quite different. The ruling race annexed the gods of the conquered to their own without taking them away from their original possessors, and Tanit continued to be adored at Carthage, even while she was taking her place in the capital at Rome under

her new Roman name of 'the Heavenly Goddess.' Baal Hammon became Saturn, and even Saturnus Augustus under the Empire, and his temples multiplied in Africa. In Roman eyes religions were local affairs. The conquerors prayed to the gods of the conquered, and in order to be sure not to leave any of them out they prayed to all of them at once under the name of 'the Moorish gods,' for the safety of the empire and the success of their armies. In this way religious cults became one link more between all the inhabitants of a given land, no matter what their race or what their condition.

The Roman conquest was made at the expense of Carthage alone. The real natives took part on both sides, but the greater number turned toward the Romans because the latter were not exerting their forces against the Berbers themselves. Their victory here was free from those terrible chastisements with which it was too often accompanied in ancient times, and no hatred could follow. The racial similarity between the native population and the newcomers was as pronounced as it had been in Gaul and in Spain. Knowledge of Latin spread rapidly and was greatly aided by the growth of Christianity, which followed the same course throughout the Roman world and in the beginning was accompanied by the same persecutions everywhere.

The ideal of the natives was to be as much like the Romans as possible, to acquire the right of citizenship, the privilege of wearing the toga, and the exercise of office. After a few generations, assimilation began. Latin immigrants helped it along. Colonies of business men came from Italy in large numbers. Great Roman families bought land in Africa. As we should say to-day, they invested their capital and developed their mandates. The Numidians began to take Roman names, without